Goldberg’s Remedies for a Blah Protag

Myla Goldberg’s novel Wickett’s Remedy hooked me with the packaging. As an owner of a turn-of-the-century house and a collector of vintage paper items, I was thrilled by the image of the old-fashioned “medicine” bottle label. (The heft of the 9-CD unabridged version didn’t hurt either.)

See? Pretty. Cover Designer People (T. Oliver Peabody & Jean Traina), I want to shake your hands.



The audiobook almost lives up to its cover’s promise. Wickett’s Remedy is an unusual combination of elements. A straightforward – if unexciting – tale of a Boston shopgirl’s experiences during the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic coincides with the evolution of her husband’s faux-medical remedy. Like Fannie Flagg, Goldberg augments her story with period news reports, public service announcements, newsletters, brochures and letters.

Oh yes, and one truly unique element – the voices of the dead speaking in the margins.

At first, I found the hollow-sounding marginal voices distracting and a little annoying. But as the story went on, I grew to love them. I smiled each time one interrupted with a correction. Their purpose at first seemed only to be to poke fun at the fallacy of memory, but as the influenza epidemic’s death toll rose, they became a poignant medium for expressing the great loss.

Another feature that could’ve been annoying but escaped with a gold star instead – Goldberg’s apparent use of every multi-syllabic word in Roget’s 20th Century Thesaurus. I’ve been a lover of language since childhood when I corrected my mother’s grammar instead of vice versa (to her everlasting annoyance), but I usually despise overuse of big words in novels. The trouble with most big-word usage is that it’s out of place in the story.

In Wickett’s Remedy, the somewhat antiquated words fit with the setting. But more than that, they are used correctly. Goldberg knows not only the definition of the words she’s using but also all the little nuances. She doesn’t throw them about willy-nilly, and she doesn’t try to shove them in awkward places. These big words fit, and that’s enough to give a word nerd a tiny shiver of pleasure.

Add up the old-big-word fun, the marginal voices and the fascinating backdrop, and it’s easy to forget that the main character’s story isn’t particularly interesting. Who needs excitement when you can broaden your vocabulary?