What are you reading in May?
In our monthly book club, we discuss whatever we happen to be reading and ask everyone in the comments to do the same. What Are You Reading This Month?
I count myself among the many, many people who found Paula Hawkins’ The Girl On The Train to be a smart and tightly crafted thriller. It memorably created a clever twist on the unreliable narrator by making a first-person account of murder and memory subject to alcoholic blackouts, while remaining a briskly paced mystery. So while I had hopes for Into The Water, the novelist’s follow-up, I was especially curious to see which stylistic devices and literary choices are endemic to Hawkins the writer, and which were exclusively the purview of the previous story. It’s no surprise to discover that Hawkins has some recurring themes in her work—specifically, the faulty nature of memory, and the myriad ways our respective (and often conflicting) accounts of the past can shape our lives, relationships, and personalities in ways both understandable and disastrous. The book is a more sprawling affair than its predecessor, and while it’s also less successful, leaning heavily on the melodramatic, it nonetheless retains the author’s facility with unraveling a strange and ever-shifting mystery. In this case, it’s the death of Danielle Abbott, a single mother and artist whose plan to do a large project about the numerous women who ostensibly killed themselves in the river running through the small town of Beckford sets off an investigation that slowly pulls seemingly half the neighborhood into its orbit. The chapters are divided up from the perspectives of nearly a dozen characters, the better for Hawkins to explore her pet subject: the flawed faculty of memory, and its ruinous effect on the social contract between friends and family. Every character is haunted by their past—incidents that play out completely differently from person to person, things left unsaid, half-recollections that roil and shift from day to day—and the novel as a whole ends up a lengthy meditation on the regrets that haunt us.
More accurately, it’s about the ones that haunt women. Danielle’s daughter and sister, her former friend whose own daughter took her life in the river the previous year, a new-in-town detective inspector, and the local psychic all have inner conversations with the women now absent from their lives, showing how those closest to us never really leave, their personalities and passions imprinted on our minds, continuing to offer judgment and color our understanding of events as we try to carry on with the difficult business of living. The overburdened narrative sometimes gets in the way of these more intriguing character studies, unfortunately. The investigation into Danielle’s death soon becomes a Magnolia-esque “everything is connected” riff on violence and generations, with every single central character holding onto scandalous secrets, just waiting to reveal them at exactly the most dramatic moment possible. (Did I mention the psychic whose powers—pause for effect—might be real?) Despite the overstuffed plot and gimmickry, Hawkins has a real gift for exploring the manner in which we constantly turn things over in our minds, crafting inner monologues both rich and relatable. Into The Water may stumble over its more strained subplots, but it remains a lively, compelling, and surprisingly empathetic and humane page-turner.