I fell for you because that’s what you do when you meet the woman whose face you want to be looking into when you die. You fall. And keep falling. And if you’re really lucky, she falls with you and then you never get back up again to where you were because if that was so great, you wouldn’t have needed to fall in the first place.
Rachel Childs has not had the best childhood. Her mother was a famed psychologist and writer of self-help relationship manuals in public, and a miserable, lonely pessimist in private. Rachel has never known her father and her mother’s emotional manipulation has hit her hard. Her fledgling career spirals out of control and crashes and burns, the few friends she has left treacle out of her life one by one and she develops crippling agoraphobia, turning her into a recluse. Yet no matter what, her husband Brian sticks by her side. He’s considerate, caring, patient, understanding and kind.
So Rachel is more than a little surprised to find herself out one evening, pointing a gun at his chest and pulling the trigger. Brian, on the other hand, seems entirely unsurprised.
This is not a spoiler, by the way; the book begins with this announcement, then loops back to Rachel’s childhood, her tepid and unsatisfying search for her father, her career soaring and crashing, her flaccid first marriage and her mental illness. The first half of the book focuses on this. It’s an odd technique, but not a bad one, because the marriage that Lehane crafts for these people is a soothing one, one of mutual respect, gentle in-jokes and entirely plausible bathroom conversations. Authors don’t always manage to make protagonists as likeable as they aim for, but Brian seems to be a genuinely nice person. Rachel, too, isn’t the product of extremely violent actions that crime writers seem to prefer, but the victim of circumstance and shoddy parenting. And sure, while there is a degree of exaggeration here – it is, after all, a thriller, designed to be interesting by default – it all seems refreshingly normal.
The major issue I have with this book is that it’s – if you’ll excuse the metaphor – almost bipolar. The first three quarters give us the highs and lows of Rachel’s life, with their increasingly intense peaks. It’s a fast-paced but well-written story that paints an intruiging picture of a life strung together by disappointment. The last quarter is where it comes of the rails and where it turns ludicrous, full of hired killers and brain splatter and wigs and fake passports and grifters and copouts and, well, too many things Lehane really ought to know better than to employ so lavishly. It’s the textual equivalent of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Which is a shame, both because I really enjoyed the first part of the book and because Lehane is a competent writer. The man knows how to put in a turn of phrase. The ending, too, is not exactly in line with the rest of the book; Lehane spends a lot of time exposing the messiness and unpredictability of life, only to tie up the plot at the end with a neat bow and presenting it to us on a silver platter. It doesn’t add up. Not to mention the approach the book takes to mental illness; apparently severe agoraphobia can be cured by witnessing multiple violent acts and lose all faith in the world around. Who knew, right?
I won’t say I didn’t enjoy this – I did – but it would’ve been so much better if it had stuck to its guns.