Some Instructions to My Wife: Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood

FROM THE PUBLISHER

From "Putting Things Away" to "The Marriage Almanac" (not to mention the pedantic "Index," in itself a comic wonder), Stanley Crawford gives the married, the unmarried, and the formerly married a classic satire on all the sanctimonious marriage manuals ever produced. Starting with the complete title, Some Instructions to My Wife Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage, and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood, a boorish narrator sets down some seventy-three pieces of advice to his wife, young son, and two-year-old daughter, intended to foster and maintain domestic tranquility in an age of anxiety. Taken literally, our neo-Victorian head of the house is a male chauvinist pig of sorts, but what reader would deny that the sources of Crawford's satire run deep in the American grain?Some Instructions is the madly precise fantasy of a husband and father who has stepped through the marital looking glass just to see, from the other side, the perfectly kept house and the well-functioning marriage and family.

"Stanley Crawford's satire on Victorian marriage manuals cheerfully lampoons male domination fantasies that persist even in such enlightened times as these. . . . Crawford negotiates the literary tightrope he has strung up faultlessly, providing a piercing and comical dissection of the modern institution of marriage." (New York Newsday 5-24-87)

"The title of Some Instructions . . . nicely conjures the Swiftian satire of its contents—the eccentric dictums of an autocratic husband attempting to keep the world's chaos at bay." (Publishers Weekly 4-27-92)

"Reminiscent of instructions by Renaissance husbands to their younger wives is this witty manual of household management and deportment . . . no detail of household economy or personal deportment is too small to merit the squire's personal attention." (Booklist)

"The disease of fatherhood, however retrograde and on the brink of extinction by classification, is, in the hands of Stanley Crawford, a necessary disorder, still painfully insightful and beautiful." (Ben Marcus, Voice Literary Supplement 9-8-96)

"A master stroke of comic inventiveness." (Library Journal 4-15-78)

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Swiftian satire from Crawford, whose novel takes the form of an instruction manual written for his family by a neo-Victorian horticulturist. (Mar.)

Library Journal