SECRETS! SECRETS! SECRETS!
Don't ask what came over me but I've just read two borderline
chicklit novels, both recent best sellers. I thought I was done
with popular fiction after I survived "The Goldfinch," but maybe not.
"You Should Have Known," by Jean Hanff Korelitz (NY:Grand Central, 2014.) is one of those novels about Manhattan rich girls -- the skinny
moms with their $9,000 Birkins and everyday Choos, waiting for their children outside whichever private school they somehow got their child into. Korelitz is smart about this Upper East Side milieu. She knows all the signs and symbols. You get the feeling she is in them but not necessarily of them.
Grace, forty-something, is a couples therapist, married to Jonathan, a
pediatric oncologist, mother of Henry, a 13-year old student at
a Dalton-like school where Grace also went. Grace is about to publish
a book central to this story. Her theory is we marry or commit to a person
we really know nothing about. Courtship has dulled our senses and we
refuse to look beyond the glow. We don't question, we don't probe, we
leap ahead blindly, trusting in love. "If a woman chose the wrong person,
he was always going to be the wrong person," Grace says.
Grace's own marriage is seamless, a fine balancing of professions, polite
and equitable. Jonathan is immersed in his work which, of course, is
always going to be more urgent and important than Grace's. You simply cannot argue with pediatric cancer.
Grace goes to fund-raising meetings for the school and sees her patients. She manages family life in the 3-bedroom flat she grew up in on East 81st Street. Her wonderful boy and her god-like husband leave her with little to wish for. Naturally, this is a set-up for disaster. Just when you are wondering where all this is going, Grace's world falls apart.
Jonathan, it turns out, is a psychopathic liar, a person who completely
fooled Grace and everyone else. Nothing, nothing he ever said or did,
was true. Grace and Henry flee 81st Street to restart their lives in
an unheated lake house in Connecticut which also happens to
belong to Grace. It looks like there may be a happy ending --
wandering into "Bridges of Madison County" country.
I didn't like Grace much. Jonathan, who never appears in person, is intriguing. Henry is a solid character, a fine, decent boy. Even if I didn't love the book, I see that Grace's theory has a lot going for it. Do we ever know the truth about somebody else? Isn't it a gigantic crap shoot to link our destinies to someone we barely know?
"The Husband's Secret" by Liane Moriarty (NY:Putnam's, 2013) is about three Melbourne women whose lives intersect. The level of their comings and goings doesn't compare to the hedge-fund stratosphere in the Korelttz novel but it is comfortable enough.
A marriage splits and the wife goes home to mother, a 29-year-old mystery surfaces and a perfectionist housewife (and super Tupperware specialist!) (WHAT?) cracks up. A husband and his mother keep an awful secret. Family life continues with descriptions of pirate birthday parties and soy decaf cappuccino in the Australian suburbs.
The reader doesn't give a rip what happens to any of these people and
wonders why she downloaded the book in the first place. The writing is
excessively fluent. Admittedly, there are a few insights into marriage
and parenting and the question is raised to what lengths would you go to preserve family life.
You're on your own here. It is too exhausting to say more.
