Review by New York Times Review
IT'S been 30 years since the publication of Thomas Harris's "The Silence of the Lambs," the suspense novel that pitted the F.B.I. trainee Clarice Starling against the serial killer Hannibal Lecter, showcased them as they bored into each other's psyches and did more to change the genre than any novel until Gillian Flynn's "Gone Girl" a generation later. To revisit "The Silence of the Lambs" today is to encounter a story that shows its age - not just because of the of-its-era language in which transgender issues are discussed, but because it is something that too few thrillers dare to be in 2018: strictly linear. Harris's book gets its title from Lecter's remorseless probing of a terrifying, and personality-shaping, experience from Starling's childhood - the night she awoke to hear the cries of spring lambs being slaughtered and realized she was powerless to help them. Lecter forces this disclosure as part of a deal: He'll offer clues about a current killer if Clarice provides information about the childhood vulnerabilities that still drive her as an adult. It's unnerving, it's effective and, most transgressively, it's chronological. Harris tells his story with nary a flashback, just unremitting forward momentum right up to the final chapter's climactic taunt - "Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?" In its way, "The Silence of the Lambs" is a novel about early trauma - the thing that Lecter, the evil genius, is acute enough to perceive through all of Starling's careful presentational concealment. But it casts only brief, fierce sidelong glances at the past. If it were written today, Clarice's early years would almost certainly get about 100 more pages of play, in chapters that alternate with the present-day case and slow-walk readers through her youth until reaching the incident that is meant to explain everything about who she is now. Ours is an era in which we are all becoming fluent in the language of trauma, post-traumatic stress, recovery and survival, but what is good for humanity may be bad for thrillers. Agreat suspense novel should be, on some level, destabilizing; at least once, even as the narrative propels you onward, you should want to go back to reread a passage that's been completely recontextualized by something you just learned. But today, trauma as a universal motivator has worked its way so deeply into the architecture of many novels that it threatens to become mundane. No matter how many skeletons are unearthed, if the sole purpose of revealing them is to vanquish the darkness with explanatory lucidity, the result is distinctly unthrilling, as if the entirety of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" were now narrated by the loquacious shrink who pops up at the end of the movie. Split timelines - the bad past that explains the bad present - are a genre staple, and the emergence of something awful and long-suppressed is such a consistent motif that it has turned many novels into waiting games: "What exactly happened back then? Tell!" Readers speed ahead not because they're gripped but because they're impatient with so much calculated withholding. If these books become efficient conveyor belts that trundle along with the promise of a tidy little gift bag of answers and rationales right out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, you may well feel relieved, but you are unlikely to feel disturbed. For a thriller, disturbed is better. ONE of the most exciting things about Sara Gran's the infinite blacktop (Atria, $26) is the way it uses all of these often restrictive neo-conventions to its advantage in order to create a completely original hybrid of mystery, thriller, contemporary noir, dark comedy and postmodern meditation about what it means to be a detective. This is the third in a series of novels to feature Claire DeWitt, the self-professed "best detective in the world," although she is actually closer to Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone if Kinsey had thrown everything away and taken a serious turn toward the dark side. The newest story opens in 2011, as Claire is on the wrong end of a car crash that may be a deliberate attempt to kill her. As Gran hurtles ahead in that narrative, we also leap back to an account of the disappearance of Claire's childhood friend in 1986 Brooklyn and to a third story, of the 1999 case that made her into a professional detective. Gran makes this fragmentation, in which no single story line ever becomes central, feel organic to her main character, who also seems constructed out of jagged shards, and is as dangerous as you'd imagine someone fitting that description might be. She steals cars, pulls knives on people who get in her way and cold-cocks others when they double-cross her, scrawling "CLAIRE DEWITT ALWAYS WINS" on their walls as a flourish. She views life experience as an "infinite blacktop of things you'd regret not knowing later" and her future as "a long series of empty moments that took me down a ... highway to nowhere in particular." We don't know why she's like this; she doesn't either. In fact, nobody in this cold, hard-core, genre-blurring novel can be understood except in analogical terms; even a murderer finds himself bewildered to be "someone who DID things. Someone like the people in detective novels." In "The Infinite Blacktop," all that brings characters together is that they dissociate on the same frequency. For good measure, Gran throws in excerpts from a detection manual that has special meaning for Claire, and a long chunk of a teen-sleuth saga as well. The last quarter of her book takes a plunge into metafiction that is likely to be polarizing. (Note scribbled in the margin: "What IS this?") But it helps that Gran has an engagingly sardonic voice and a sure grip of storytelling basics, even those she is manifestly interested in ignoring or transcending; in particular, the 1999 sections work as a satisfying whodunit/whydunit of which Ross Macdonald probably would have approved. "The Infinite Blacktop" is droll, savage and healthily unsettling, even at moments when it verges on becoming an essay about its own construction. THE ENGLISH novelist Camilla Way may not be the innovative stylist Gran is, but in THE LIES WE TOLD (Berkley, paper, $16), she makes up for it with no-nonsense efficiency. "At first I mistook the severed head for something else. It wasn't until I was very close that I realized it was Lucy's," she begins in 1986. Just a couple of pages later, she leaps to present-day London, where we're immersed in the lives of Clara Haynes and Luke Lawson, a young couple who both work in magazines. Luke has a secret life on the internet (there may be a contemporary thriller in which the role Facebook is assigned is non-malevolent, but it has not yet presented itself). He also has a stalker. He soon goes missing, but let's not linger on that too long, because there's poor decapitated Lucy to consider. The other half of this novel, which alternates timelines throughout, unfolds the plight of Doug and Beth Jennings, who have a bird-murdering, fire-starting 5-year-old bad seed of a daughter. The kiddie sociopath with the thousand-yard glower may be somewhat too easy a go-to in thrillers, but anyone who grew up on mass-market paperbacks for which the cover art was some forbidding version of a blood-spattered, blankly staring broken doll will feel an almost nostalgic connection to this novel. The intrigue of "The Lies We Told" is, at least initially, how and when these two plotlines - the demon seed from 30 years back and the possibly kidnapped boyfriend from right now - are going to knit together. If the answer seems slightly inevitable just from that description, at least Way throws in three or four other questions that become suspenseful in their own right, all of which come under the general heading of "How well do you really know your boyfriend/daughter/ son/ mother/neighbor?" The writing isn't dazzling, but the construction and pacing are solid, staying just far enough ahead of the reader to be fun, and offering, in the last quarter, a buffet table of twists - if you don't like one, just stick around for 10 pages - and an open door to a sequel. More than one of the women in this novel is a monster, more than one of the men is an easily manipulated dolt or lech, and its view of mental illness is antediluvian. But nobody ever said thrillers have to play nice as long as they play fair. BITTER ORANGE (Tin House, $25.95), by Claire Fuller, plays both nice and fair. This is not a particularly brutal or cruel novel, as thrillers go. Again the timeline is split: In 1989, Frances Jellico, a woman in late middle age, lies dying in an institution of some kind, while remembering a summer she spent 20 years earlier with a young couple that represented everything she had always been denied - friendship, pleasure, sexuality, intimacy Frances, a lonely, awkward social misfit recently freed from the constraints of caring for her sick mother but still burdened with plenty of baggage, is a type familiar to readers of the great Ruth Rendeli - a woman whose personal issues will end up making her either a victim or an agent of chaos. And Peter and Cara, who share a languorous, hothouse summer with her in an old English country mansion to which they've brought their own secrets, are the spark. Fuller, a skilled stylist, is very good at letting you get to know Frances by degrees and at describing a setting in which the ordinary rules of life feel suspended. She conveys the exoticism of a temporary new home and the eroticism of a temporary new attachment. You can taste the wine, smell the musty fabrics and the overripe fruit, hear the hum of lazy insects and track the teasing suggestion that something will eventually go terribly wrong. She keeps the suspense at such a low simmer - as if Anita Brookner had decided to try her hand at a potboiler - that you might be forgiven for wondering if, at times, the flame has gone out altogether. What tension there is rests on whether the rupture - the thing that will make that summer describable as "fateful" - will arrive because Frances is unequipped to deal with this couple, or because they're sinister and somehow using her as a pawn. But the very fact that Frances is narrating the story in a second, decades-later timeline lowers the stakes by removing one possibility: Whatever happens, you know that she lives to tell the tale. Too much of "Bitter Orange" consists of two interesting, dramatic people doling out selective information to their undramatic listener; even as the noose tightens (and it does), you sense you could still slip out of it. It's a tribute to Fuller's abilities that even when her plot feels slight, the atmosphere she conjures creates its own choking sense of dread. SARAH PINBOROUGH has set the swift and entertaining CROSS HER HEART (Morrow/ HarperCoiiins, $26.99) entirely in present-day England, opting (at least initially) for one timestream but multiple narrators. Her story is told variously by Lisa, a 40-ish recruitment executive with a busy job and the loss of a young son in her past; her teenage daughter, Ava, who compulsively checks Facebook, connects with her friends in a WhatsApp group called MyBitches, is being text-seduced by a creepy older man, and is, in general, a first-act-of-"SVU" victim in print form; and Marilyn, Lisa's closest friend. Pinborough writes these women with a good ear, a lack of sentimentality and a sharp sense of how difficult intergenerational communication can be. She also holds the cards she's planning to play very tightly Sixty pages in, "Cross Her Heart" still feels less like a thriller than like one of those books with a drearily earnest set of reader's guide questions at the end: "What did you think of Lisa's choices? Do you think Lisa and Ava have more in common than they realize?" But stick with it, because when Pinborough unveils her first surprise about a third of the way in, it's a good one, so good that even the legally mandated device that kicks in with it - chapters headed "Now," "After" and (for a big 1989 section) "Before" - doesn't slow her novel's momentum. None of the plot points here are entirely new - they involve the requisite terrible teenage incident, multiple identities, the internet, the possibility of false memory, at least one total psycho, a decades-long game of revenge and a climax (one of many) about which one character, not inappropriately, remarks, "You sound like you're in one of those terrible straight-to-DVD thrillers!" But what feels fresh is the dispatch with which Pinborough throws every one of them into a single novel. The mechanics aren't deftly concealed here, but the machine itself works, motoring toward about five different endings. "Cross Her Heart" also has a welcome sisterhood-ispowerful vibe; it's a novel that defines women by their relationships with one another, even as their creator is ruthlessly shoving them into position for the next twist. RELATIONSHIPS AMONG WOMEN - even women who have never met - are also at the core of Sarah Meuleman's find me gone (Harper/HarperCollins, paper, $15.99), which IS set in 2014 New York and in northwest Belgium in 1996, where, sigh, The Bad Thing That Will Be Dosed Out One Teaspoon at a Time occurred. There is a lot that needs to be forgiven in the early stages of this novel. Our protagonist is Hannah, a fashion-mag journalist whose full-time position filing a mere 200 words of party coverage per issue (!) affords her a nice apartment in the West Village (!!), but who forsakes both job and rental for the wild yet integritypacked frontier of Bushwick, where she plans to write a book. We intuit that something horrible has happened to her, partly because Hannah's friend helpfully says: "We all know about the horrible thing that happened." (This is a novel in which, be warned, things like that are said with regularity.) Signs suggest that whatever it was happened 18 years earlier, when Hannah was a child in Bachte-Maria-Leerne. When "Find Me Gone" pries itself away from its unconvincing glimpse of Downtown Manhattan's publishing-and-parties demimonde, it becomes a stranger and darker novel than its beginning suggests. The Belgium sections, about a dreadful kidnapping and the shaky romantic friendship between two girls on the cusp of puberty, are believable, and then Agatha Christie and Virginia Woolf show up as characters in chapters of their own. They're part of the book Hannah is writing, about writers who "fought their battles, swam against the current and then disappeared one day. Just like the 12-year-old girl who vanished from a Belgian village," a connection it would have been better to allow readers to make. Showing one's hand like that doesn't help a thriller, nor does leaning on "Where is this all going?" for as long as "Find Me Gone" does. Hannah's journey is persuasively grim and not without surprises; ultimately, it becomes a meditation on the possibility that a woman can create her identity by controlling the terms of her own disappearance. But I couldn't help wondering if that magazine job was still available. MARK HARRIS'S most recent book is "Five Came Back." He is currently working on a biography of Mike Nichols.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 14, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* For most of her adult life, Frances Jellico has colored within the lines while her lackluster life was made hollower by a complete lack of companionship. When she arrives on assignment to study the architecture at Lyntons, a decaying estate in the English countryside, she discovers an unexpected bonus, friendship with a young, hedonistic couple, Peter Robertson and Cara Calace. Peter has been assigned to inventory the valuables on site, while the tempestuous Cara keeps him company. Over the heady summer of 1969, the three form an increasingly volatile trio as they are sucked into a complicated vortex defined by each character's complicated past. Fuller (Swimming Lessons , 2017) is a master of propulsive action, making the ground spin as each unreliable narrator takes center stage. Every measured sentence ( I used to be a big woman,' voluptuous Frances once said. Now my flesh has melted away but the skin remains and I lie in a puddle of myself.' ) builds on itself with the crumbling estate providing the saturated backdrop for this ultimately macabre tale. A distracting plot element or two notwithstanding, Fuller's tale offers a gripping and unsettling look at the ugly side of extreme need and the desperate measures taken in the name of love.--Poornima Apte Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Fuller's brooding latest (after Swimming Lessons) is set in one of those decaying British mansions tailor-made for a story of dysfunctional relationships. In the summer of 1969, socially awkward and anxious Frances Jellico is 39 and has been hired by an American who just bought a crumbling estate in the British countryside to survey the landscape and buildings on it. Making herself at home in a decrepit attic room, she is surprised to discover a young couple there, living in the rooms below hers, and can't resist spying on them through a peephole that conveniently links her bathroom to theirs. Peter, handsome and welcoming, has been hired to survey the contents of the manor, though he spends more time drinking up the contents of its wine cellar. Cara, Irish and pretentious, tells Frances long, implausible stories of her life, which the credulous Frances soaks up. Frances falls in love with Peter and believes he reciprocates her feelings while ignoring the more suitable vicar of the local church. Cannily releasing clues on the way to an explosive finale, Fuller moves fluidly between the time of the story and a period 20 years later, when Frances is lying in a hospital and close to death. The lush setting and remarkable characters make for an immersive mystery. Agent: David Forrer, InkWell Management. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In summer 1969, bookish Frances -Jellico is hired by an American named Mr. -Liebermann, the new owner of Lyntons, an -abandoned English country estate. Her job is to evaluate the neglected grounds for restoration. When Frances arrives, she is surprised to find another couple settled in the mansion rooms below hers. Antiques expert Peter, also hired by Liebermann to report on needed repairs, and his girlfriend, Cara, a flighty, unstable woman, who tells Frances elaborate lies about her background. Frances finds the habits of this hedonistic couple troubling, so different from her own sheltered life in London, but when she confides in the local vicar, he warns her not to get involved. However, as the hot summer unfolds, Frances revels in her new freedom and is drawn in by reckless Cara and particularly Peter, who raids the wine cellar, sells off the Lynton family heirlooms, and pockets most of the money to pay alimony to his wife. Partly narrated by Frances 20 years later from her death bed, this story spirals and twists to a shocking conclusion. VERDICT Desmond Elliott Prize-winning Fuller's stunning third novel (after Swimming Lessons) is a masterpiece that takes us to the dark places of human emotions.-Donna -Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Fuller's (Swimming Lessons, 2017, etc.) latest novel is seductive on the outside, but hidden within is a sinister story that considers the terrifying lengths people will go to escape their pasts.It's the summer of 1969, and for the first time in 39 years, Frances Jellico is free of any routine. One month ago, she buried her mother, the callous woman she'd been bound to since birth. When she's commissioned to survey and write a report on the garden architecture of Lyntons, an old English country house outside London, Frances leaves her home, and turbulent past, to settle into the mansion's furnished attic for the summer. From the moment she meets Cara and Peter, the attractive couple staying in the rooms below hers, Frances is besotted. Peter, she learns, has been hired to assess the foundation and state of the house, which, after years of neglect following the war, is in poor condition. Frances becomes enraptured by the carefree, unbridled passion Peter and Cara seamlessly exude. All her life, she has yearned for that sense of freedomto be unburdened of her loneliness, her insecurities, her endless guilt. After discovering a peephole in her bathroom floor, Frances takes to watching their intimate lives play out from above. Equally intrigued by Frances, the couple invites her into their lives, eager to share their desires and secrets with a captive audience. The three spend their languid days indulging in decadent meals, drinking, sunbathing, and reveling in the frivolity of one another's company. But as Fuller's novel progresses, Frances' friendship with the couple turns claustrophobic. The stories Cara and Peter have fed Frances slowly begin to unfurl, revealing a labyrinth of deceptions that Frances finds herself in the middle of. When strange things begin to happen throughout the house, Frances realizes she knows nothing about Cara and Peter. Much like Lyntons, they're "beautiful on the surface, but look a little closer and everything is decaying, rotting, falling apart." In the vein of Shirley Jackson's bone-chilling The Haunting of Hill House, Fuller's disturbing novel will entrap readers in its twisty narrative, leaving them to reckon with what is real and what is unreal.An intoxicating, unsettling masterpiece. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
