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Although the denouement spoils the plot, Sater’s psychological thriller is a captivating read of a typically ignorant-of-religious-values person who thinks killing his wife is the cure to alleviating her pain from terminal cancer.
It’s understandable why Hank Mitchell would want to kill his wife, Eliza. Hank is ignorant of religious values. He shuns religious tenets and institutions; Hank’s reaction to a Baptist minister reading a Bible passage to him is that “He dreaded hearing readings from the Bible, which usually made little sense to him” (141). Furthermore, Hank seems content to merely pass his life in a secluded area of rural Ohio and not expose himself to others’ perspectives. A beloved daughter has died, and he has no other family, so his wife means everything to him.
Well, maybe not. After all, instead of being a husband who cares for his wife not merely by doing chores for her or assisting her with mobility, Hank kills her out of a mistaken sense of ending her poor quality of life or presumed pain (which is obviously more his pain than hers) with (talk about dehumanizing!) the horse tranquilizer Xylazine. It’s no wonder, then, that the cognitive dissonance he experiences leads to a rather good climax worthy of a Hitchcock thriller. That the identity of the person who digs up Eliza’s body not once, not twice, but four times and who puts her corpse on her bed those four times occurs on page 214 testifies to Sater’s ability to carry the reader’s interest until the end of the novel a mere eight pages later.
The denouement, however, spoils the plot. In the penultimate chapter, Hank commits suicide by ingesting the same poison with which he killed Eliza. In the final chapter titled “Epilogue”, subtitled “Spring”, Hank is magically reunited with Eliza and his deceased daughter Brenda. Were the preceding 217 pages merely a dream?
Has Hank gone to Heaven—an unjustifiable conclusion, for, while God is merciful, He is also just. Where would the justice be for a man who rejected one of the key purposes of his being a husband by murdering his wife at a time when she is most vulnerable?
Is Hank in a Purgatory-like state where he has a second chance to revise his life, abstaining from murdering her? Impossible, since, as Christian theologians have demonstrated, Purgatory is not a site for reincarnation.
Or is this merely a feeble denouement to end the novel on a happy note because American readers who are as ignorant as Hank about the value of suffering cannot accept any suffering, any pain, thinking that it is always something which must be eradicated at all costs, even using immoral means?
Euthanasia advocates (those who want to kill the medically vulnerable and elderly out of misplaced compassion) will not appreciate the (anti)hero of Sater’s novel as a champion for their cause. Hank, a husband of fifty-three years, is woefully ignorant on how to assist his wife with complications from her cancer, the most severe complication being seizures of which she is blissfully unaware when she comes out of them, but which disturb him immensely.
Prolife readers (the rest of us), however, can use Sater’s work as evidence that even what seems to be a dire case which would justify killing someone in assisted suicide or euthanasia always damages the one who kills.
Furthermore, those of us husbands who cared for our wives throughout their years of medical problems can be proud that we didn’t murder our beloved wives as Hank killed his.