I am way at a cottage with L. and B. and our kids and so wanted a book I could read in the four minute spurts between needing to find someone their bathing suit or reading someone else Robert Munch or chasing someone else with a bottle of sunscreen. Cue a best selling thriller – Ruth Ware’s One Perfect Couple.
What great timing for a book about a reality TV show that features couples brought together on a remote island to undergo some challenges and through the challenges break up some couples and couple-swap. Great timing because K. just recommended “Perfect Match” which is – minus the murder – the same plot of this reality TV show and so watching and reading them at the same time served to consolidate my sense of self-loathing for giving any of my time (never mind my reading and viewing time) to such terrible media.
Terrible in the case of One Perfect Couple because while the premise and opening chapters promise enthralling thriller where you can sink into a page-turning ripper it just… doesn’t deliver. I’d be more inclined to read the novel version of the reality show the novel begins with (but I guess I’m already watching the show). As the book progresses and the survivors of the giant storm are trying to keep alive, there’s a ‘murderer’ only it isn’t any kind of whodunnit so much as there’s a guy killing people and everyone else sort of lets it happen until they don’t. So maybe it’s trying to be an exploration of how good people stand by and let bad things happen? Or because it’s the women who ultimately come together to stop the Bad Man it’s meant to be a feminist take down? I suppose either are plausible, but neither really come together in the end. Instead we’re left with a sort of shrug of complicity and eventual spur to action with a less than satisfying climax where you can already anticipate how things will go.
Maybe the most interesting is whether I keep watching Perfect Match. Oh that’s true, as suspenseful as One Perfect Couple, which is to say: not at all suspenseful. Of course I will.
Literary Vice 