Robley Wilson, The World Still Melting Review

The World Still Melting

Robley Wilson

Dunne, Feb 2005, $24.95, 263 pp.

ISBN: 0312336799



In 1980s Iowa farm country, Harvey and Nancy Riker, Burton Stone and Paul and Arlene Tobler are neighbors. Harvey abuses Nancy who finds first solace and then love with former Nam veteran Burton. When Harvey learns of their affair, he gets a gun to kill Burton, but instead murders Paul for being a Good Samaritan by trying to stop the violence before it happens. While the grieving widow Arlene returns to her family in South Dakota, Harvey goes to prison and Nancy and Burton marry.



When vagrants use the vacated Tobler home as a shelter, Burton becomes upset, feeling these break-ins are blasphemy and a reminder of the cost to his friends of his happiness. He fixes a shotgun to the door so when someone opens the weapon fires at them to scare them away. Arlene's adult son Peter opens the booby trapped door only to take a shot into his knee, shattering the joint. With Harvey cheerleading Peter on, he sues Burton.



THE WORLD STILL MELTING looks closely at the relationships between farmers and the land and between the farm families. The storyline is a combination of a soap opera with the Grapes of Wrath battle against nature, the government and the bank. When the tale stays with farmer vs. the environment (natural and man-made), Robley Wilson cleverly uses the past to provides a well written SPLENDID OMEN of what could reoccur in the future. However, when the plot concentrates on the dysfunctional relationships, readers ask "Why soap up the farm?"


Harriet Klausner