2016 read #74: The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
326 pages
Published 2015
Read from September 23 to September 26
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

I tend to be suspicious of runaway bestsellers. Whatever the ingredient is that makes the likes of Tom Clancy, Robert Patterson, Stephanie Meyer, and their ilk so aggressively ubiquitous, I would not consider it to be "quality writing." I also tend to shy away from mysteries. Murder, clues, "whodunit" -- those words on a jacket flap make me drop a book faster than any others, faster even than "dream wedding." The whole setup bores me, with vanishingly few exceptions (the better Sherlock Holmes stories, mostly, which I haven't read since I was a teen). So I never would have given this book a second look, had not my college friend Francesca nominated it for our informal, two-person book club, on its first reconvening since Doomsday Book.

Spoilers ahead.

This book is intense. Almost all of its power comes from narration, from point of view, digging the reader so deeply into the heads and perspectives of flawed, profoundly damaged people that at times it can be exhausting. It was a slow read for me because the intensity took a lot out of me. The unreliability of the narration is brilliantly done -- and, further, shapes and defines the thematic through-line of the novel. For the longest time I was convinced I had seen through the red herrings and guessed whodunit -- only for the realization to stagger me, at the same that it chilled the central character, that I had been gaslit the entire time. The emotional rawness, the expert structuring, the master class on unreliable narration -- I remain astounded by the skill and intricacy at work here.

The only aspect of the book I didn't like, in fact, is the climax, which rather than building upon the anxieties and passions and disquiet of the rest of the novel, rather than delivering a more psychological payoff, devolves instead into a more predictable, generic thriller novel standoff, an altercation with a coldhearted sociopath in a goddamn thunderstorm. I won't denigrate the name of this novel by calling the showdown Koontzian, but... Hawkins could have done better, I think. Maybe she had the movie deal in mind.