If you’ve ever found yourself confined to a space – think airplane, waiting room, pandemic hideout, room-room – you’re familiar with how important high quality fiction can be for taking you out of that space, even while you remain physically rooted. I find myself in the unique (for me) experience of spending a little over a week in a smallish room that takes me six small steps to walk across. In my initial packing for this trip my suitcase was almost entirely dedicated to thick and heavy mystery novels. When S. pointed out that I might rather some of the real estate be given over to snacks and clean clothes, I scoffed. Wasn’t he aware that a new novel was worth several days of sink laundered underwear? Well. He persuaded me to put all these books on my tablet and – for the week – suspend my hatred of reading on screens. It’s too soon to tell who was right, but having removed the books and filling it instead with a yoga mat, I am *still* washing underwear in my sink, and so we were both (probably) wrong #marriagehacks
Anyway. So far – three days in – I’ve read a book (and refreshed my news feeds about ten million times): The Silent Wife by A.S.A Harrison (which now I’m thinking her first name must be part of the mystery?). It was okay? I feel like my sense of what is good writing has been completely obscured by my assessment of whether or not the book is sufficiently distracting. In this case it did well enough in that I read it in a day. Otherwise it’s pretty bland: rich white woman kills her husband in order to remain rich. I think the book tries to be interesting by layering on the rich white lady’s own complex psychology, but mostly it reads like a glossy magazine where everyone drinks expensive wine and has more than one couch.
The effort to be interesting piques with the back and forth narration between ‘her’ and ‘him,’ I suppose an effort to show how the murder is really a miscommunication – like had they been able to have full and honest conversations with one another then he might not have left and she might not have killed him (it’s not a spoiler btw to say she kills him – as much comes out on the first few pages). And what a warning for all of us in relationships (and aren’t we all in some kind of relationship) of the perils of avoidance, denial, deception and on and on. Like it’s so easy to just be honest. Or like honesty never got anyone in trouble.
Anyway. I’d hardly recommend it, but I wouldn’t scoff if you said you were planning to read it. A perfectly acceptable book for captivating your interest if you are stuck somewhere. Which isn’t the high bar I’d usually set for a novel, but then, here we are.
Literary Vice 