Since it’s publication in 2019, Alex Michaelides’s The Silent Patient has sold over 6.5 million copies. I cannot for the life of me fathom why. Usually, when I read a mega-bestseller I can understand the appeal even if I don’t particularly like it. For instance, I absolutely despised Where the Crawdads Sing, but it did have readable prose and propulsive momentum that kept me reading right up until its damnable conclusion. It also had an unusual character at its center, someone who intrigued the reader and easily garnered sympathy.
None of that is true of The Silent Patient. The novel concerns Theo Faber, a psychotherapist who gets hired at a facility for mentally ill patients. There he starts to work with the titular character, Alicia Berenson. Alicia is a renowned painter who shoots her husband and then refuses to say a word in her own defense. Literally. Theo tries everything to get her to open up, becoming obsessed with the case. He breaks protocol and begins investigating her life before the murder, speaking with her relatives and friends, uncovering the complicated backstory of her life. Along the way, he also details the collapse of his marriage, as he discovers his wife’s infidelity and tries to figure out how to handle the situation.
Alicia’s story is presented in occasional diary entries which provide shades of meaning to Theo’s interactions with the people in her life. Was her brother-in-law a dispassionate lawyer, as he claims, or was he infatuated with Alicia to the point of propositioning her in his brother’s house, as the diary claims? Was the chatty next-door neighbor a concerned close friend, or an obnoxious narcissist Alicia couldn’t stand? And the big question, of course, is Alicia the disturbed person other people present her as, or the rational person writing in her diary?
Though I admit that might sound appealing in summary, in execution Michaelides manages to drain all the intrigue out of the story. Neither Faber or Berenson come alive in their own narratives, and the supporting cast are paper-thin non-entities essentially only there to occasionally give Theo someone to talk to. Michaelides never really bothers trying to get the reader to understand why Alicia has chosen silence, or even in making the decision seem plausible.
There are, de rigueur, a few twists along the way. The main one is so obvious I don’t think that anyone familiar with the genre could fail to guess it, but politeness precludes me from spoiling it just in case. The reason it’s so apparent where the story is going is that Michaelides doesn’t invest the time to make any other path seem plausible. As annoying as that is, Michaelides compounds the error by deciding to heap absurb twists on top of the main, predictable one. So after being let down by his lack of ingenuity, the reader gets to be exasperated by his desperation.
None of this would bother me half as much if The Silent Patient were of airport-purchase quality. But it can’t even clear that low bar. Michaelides avoids memorable phrases or interesting word choices as though he would break out into hives if he used one. So, again, how has this book sold so many copies? Ultimately, that is the most intriguing mystery associated with The Silent Patient.