I don’t know why, but I’ve found myself drawn to depressing, broken people. First November 9 by Colleen Hoover, then Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill, then, after the brief interlude of joy and wonder that is the world of Harry Potter, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and Cujo by Stephen King. Well, The Girl on the Train continues the theme.
Rachel is an overweight, unemployed, and divorced alcoholic who rides the train into London every day to avoid telling her roommate and only friend that she’s lost her job. She rides passed the neighborhood where her ex-husband, Tom, and his new wife, Anna, live. Just down the road from them is a nice house with a beautiful couple whom she begins fantasizing about. They become a cypher for all her broken dreams. Only this couple isn’t perfect, and the wife ends up disappearing. Rachel, who has become obsessed with what she’s lost, and incapable of moving on with her life, keeps circling her ex-husband and his family, picking at it like a half-healed wound. The disappearance of Megan Hipwell, the woman whose life she’s begun fantasizing about, slowly encompasses her, and serves as the through-line for the book, tying all the disparate threads into one painful knot.
There’s really no other way to look at this book other than to say that Rachel is miserable and pathetic. It’s not that I didn’t like her, but you just want to scream at her to stop drinking, or stop calling her ex-husband, or stop living in a fantasy world. She’s miserable and her reality is harsh and cruel. But….I don’t hate her. I feel for her, and even empathize with her – but she’s frustrating. Infuriating, even. And I think she’s meant to be. For those who aren’t alcoholics, or don’t struggle with chronic depression, frustration is a familiar and common response to those who actually do suffer through them.
But the other characters are absolutely deplorable. Anna, having gone from the “other woman” in Tom’s marriage to Rachel, is now his wife and full of nothing but animosity and revulsion at Rachel’s downfall. Tom is an insensitive dick who is lying to his wife and stringing along his ex. And Megan is so damaged from an early trauma that she’s incapable of even cursory faithfulness to her husband, though she loves him.
By the end of the book, I want everyone but Rachel to suffer miserable ruin.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t appreciate this book, or that I wasn’t engaged in the plot. But I wasn’t rooting for anyone. Just, maybe pair this book with a nice soothing favorite.