I woke up to an unseasonably cold breeze coming through the window, so I am giving my forehead wrinkle some deepening/strengthening exercises this morning worrying that Elizabeth isn’t warm enough and we should have packed her more long pants. Well, she does have a lightweight hoodie, a medium-weight hoodie, and a raincoat; she can layer them if she’s cold.
Last night I finished an absorbing book: You Should Have Known, by Jean Hanff Korelitz.
(photo from Amazon.com)
I am so sick, SO SICK, of book summaries that are like this: “Kate Ellington had everything she ever wanted: a handsome successful husband, talented intelligent children, a great house, a cool name, and an interesting/colorful job typical of a women’s book—something like writer or psychologist or fashion-magazine staff, never accountant or Target clerk. THEN ONE DAY…something! happens! that turns her whole world upside-down and she has to re-evaluate her whole life.”
SO SICK OF IT. Furthermore, that category of book realizes it’s overdone, and so has raised the stakes: it’s gone from “it was the husband having an affair” to “it’s a car accident involving a child.” Seriously, over a period of just a few months I started THREE books that pivoted the plot on a child getting hit by a car. NO. I decline to pivot in that manner.
Anyway, this book has that exact set-up: Woman with everything; TRAGEDY STRIKES; life re-evaluation. So I NEVER would have read it except that I must have read a good review of it, because I remember I requested it from the library just by the title, without reading the jacket. Once I’d read the jacket, I renewed it TWICE before reading it: I kept putting it off and reading other books from the pile instead.
And it started off kind of slow. It’s the kind of book where the main character is having a conversation with someone and there is one line of dialogue, and while we’re waiting for the other character to reply, our girl spends two pages thinking about her office furniture. Then there is the next line of dialogue, followed by two pages of remembering how she met her husband. Wearying.
It didn’t take too long, though, before I was All In. This turned out to be a book I wanted to get back to: I’d take out my phone to play Candy Crush, and then put it away and go read the book instead. The basic plot is that a psychologist writes a book called You Should Have Known, telling women how they could have avoided a bad relationship by noticing things that were obvious from the very beginning: things the men essentially told them straight-out would be the major issues. This, as you might expect, leads to some irony.
I was very interested to see how things would turn out, and the author kept the suspense going but not in a way that made me feel I might as well flip to the last page and get it over with: the story DEVELOPED. And I found it very satisfying. There are a lot of places where WE realize something before the character does, and so the point is not the surprise of the plot but more the interest of seeing it happen to someone.
For those sensitive to scary things happening to children, I’m going to put small, non-plot-ruining spoilers in the paragraph, so skip the part between the lines of asterisks if you don’t want to read things ahead of time.
********This is the slight spoiler part beginning here*********
There is one relatively brief (a couple of pages, I think) scene where one character tells a story about something that happened to a small child, resulting in that child’s unnecessary death. Because someone is telling someone else about it calmly (rather than experiencing it as we’re reading), and because it’s not a child we’ve met elsewhere in the plot, I found it tolerable, though I did skim as soon as I realized what was going on, and I had to be careful not to start imagining the story from the mother’s point of view at the time. I think you could skim even more skimmily than I did and still understand the plot: no need to read all the details. Also, one of the main characters works as a pediatric oncologist, so there are a few example-type stories told of children dying of cancer: nothing too vivid, more like how the character will miss events because a child dies, and the age of the child will be given, and it’s easy for one’s imagination to make that a whole lot more vivid than it has to be. Again, I found it tolerable though of course unpleasant. There is one additional scene involving a child, but it crosses the plot-spoiling line to tell it; I will say only that as with the others, I found it tolerable though best to avoid imagining it too vividly. (If you won’t try the book without knowing, email me and I’ll tell you: it won’t completely spoil the plot, it just gives too much information about the kind of trajectory the book is going to take.)
*********This is the end of the slight spoiler part here********
I found the book gave me a lot of interesting things to think about, enough that on a recent longish car ride I turned off the music so I could think about the book. And it’s the kind of book that leads me to see if the author has written anything else because I want to read more. I liked it and would recommend trying it to see if you like it too.
I am glad you gave the spoiler because as much as I think it isn’t, it’s totally something that *could* bother me about a book. When I was pregnant with my twins my mom recommended a book by Chris Bohjalian called “The Night Strangers.” Except it wasn’t AT ALL the book she meant to recommend, and this is the problem with having a kindle and not recalling the name of the book you are actually reading.
Anyway, the plot included both a plane crash where people died because it was the captain’s fault (my husband is in the Navy and had just been in a collision on board his ship) AND a storyline where the father in the book decides he has to kill one of his twins and at that point I just stopped reading because I couldn’t handle it. I called my mom to confront her about suggesting such a terrible story and she was like “Oh wait, the title is actually “The Sandcastle Girls!” I haven’t read that other one.” AARGGH.
Added to my library request list. I’ve been buring through books this month at a crazy (for me) speed. I’m on my 10th book this MONTH, when in the first six months of the year I’d read nine total.
Oooh it sounds very good!
My favorite part: “I decline to pivot in that manner.”
Me too.
I can’t remember the last book I read without a damn dead child somewhere. Maybe Little House on the Prairie? And those children were in CONSTANT TERRIFYING PERIL.
Okay, first of all, I LOVE that you gave a spoiler alert warning! ;-) But I read it anyway.
This book has been added to my list of Must Reads. According to my list, I have quite a few recommendations from you. I guess I need to get started on that list then.
I started reading Korelitz because I loved the cover art for her book, Admission (ivy twining around a large capital A on a off-white background, very charming). I took it off the shelf and the dialogue from a random page biopsy was so good that I bought it. It is also a story about a women with an impossibly cool job (admissions officer at Princeton) and her erstwhile motherhood. They made a movie starring Tina Fey, and although I am a nerdy TF fangirl, the book was far better. In short, I’ll have to check out this book out because I liked Admission so much.
This is only peripherally related but when my boys were 3 and 15 mos I read “People Like that are the Only People Here” by Lorrie Moore (a short story about a pediatric oncology ward) and I became completely UNGLUED. And there was not even a tragedy in it. My husband couldn’t understand what I was yammering on about. A close friend of mine (an adult) had recently been diagnosed with cancer (spoiler alert, he’s fine, 15 yrs on) so maybe I was displacing my anxiety somehow. Anyway this is all to say I appreciate very much your careful framing of issues that may be potentially unsettling.
Thanks for the thoughtful review, Swistle. I share your squeamishness, but where the story goes, you have to follow. Want to really go to crazytown on this subject? Find a copy of my old novel, THE SABBATHDAY RIVER. You won’t thank me. (And by the way, it’s loosely based on real events. Truth is truly stranger than fiction.) JHK
First of all, how cool that the author commented on your review!
Second: yay! A book I’ve read as well and can thus discuss! I remember being frustrated at how slowly the full picture emerged. Whats-her-name kept being unable to process what had happened, which meant she avoided more information, which meant *I* couldn’t know.
Of course, I was extra frustrated that day because I was in maybe-labor-maybe-not (turns out not). It was a good distraction from that. I read it all in one day.
Oh, wow, I was going to say something but got completely distracted by the author commenting on your review!
I just love the way you write about things – books, men w/ crazy energy hands, etc.
I just finished this last night thanks to your review, Swistle, and I liked it too – much more than I thought I would when I saw (on the cover) the book was described as a “psychological thriller.” I want to join a book club and make everyone else read it so I can talk about it with someone else! Thanks for the recommendation.
Oh, good, I’m glad you liked it! I’m still thinking about it weeks later.
I also picked up the book from the library solely from your recommendation. And loved it. I may have hissed at my children a couple of times when they interrupted me at an especially good point (I prefer to think that I was modeling the appreciation of books & reading, not that I was neglecting them). Not much to add to your very good review except that it was a very smart book. Well thought-out.
Off to find The Gone-Away World now.
Oh, GOOD!
I’m reading Admission now, and feeling similarly hissy, er, I mean enthralled.