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Reading on Wednesday? More likely than you think!
I finished The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins last night, and really loved it. This book had a short period of mega-hype and was made into a movie, but I still managed to read it almost entirely unspoiled, which for me was perfect; I enjoy intricately plotted puzzle-like books, and I loved unraveling this one.
If you like completely unspoiled reading experiences, you should probably stop reading now! The rest of this post outside the cut is not hugely spoilery, but does orient you and give you an overview of what the book is about and some of its major narrative tropes. And this is a book that rewards a "the less you know" approach, if you're particularly into that.
Due to the subject matter, the book deals heavily with alcoholism and with an alcoholic trying to quit and frequently relapsing, so if those are issues for you, this book (and perhaps this post) probably will be too.
If you're okay with knowing a bit ahead of time, read on!
In particular I liked what the book did with narration. It moves in jerky, nonlinear chunks, but this works beautifully for the voice of the primary narrator, Rachel, who is an alcoholic. We rarely see Rachel drunk; instead we get her piecing together what she did afterwards, not her actions in the moment but the morning-after regrets in which she looks back on what she did and tries to fit it to a linear timeline and interpret what happened to her. There are also several other first-person narrators, but all the sections are labeled and timestamped so it's not hard to follow (though sometimes it does help to move back and forth between recent narrative sections to get the full picture of where everyone was at any given time).
Rachel lost her husband and her job to her drinking, but doesn't want her roommate to know she was fired, so she still takes the commuter train every day and then spends the day wandering aimlessly, going to bars, and drunkenly stalking her ex-husband and his new family. During these trips, the commuter train goes right past her old neighborhood, and she becomes obsessed with her husband's new next-door neighbors, a beautiful young couple who seem to have the perfect family life Rachel used to have before her life blew up in her face. She invents names and fictional lives for them. And then the wife goes missing, during a night in which Rachel, blackout-drunk, knows that she visited her old neighborhood. She wakes up covered in blood (hers? someone else's?) with no idea what happened, only that it was something bad. And she has to piece together the events of that night, for both her own sake and that of the missing woman.
Despite the fundamental unlikability of some of her actions, I really liked Rachel; she is clearly a lost, miserable person trying to grope her way out of addiction and grief for her failed marriage. The fact that most of the other characters also dislike her helped with the sympathy -- from inside her head, you can see exactly why she does what she does, but from the outside they've got a point that she comes across as a delusional stalker. So you move back and forth between Rachel as a genuinely well-intentioned person who is trying her not-so-great best to help, and Rachel as she's coming across to others while she's doing this: as basically a psycho stalker ex from hell. (I think the only thing I really disliked about the outside POV sections on Rachel is the occasional focus on her weight. Rachel is fat, and is often negatively compared to thin characters for no good reason. Usually it's clearly meant to show shallow, nasty facets of the narrator. But it happened often enough that it started bothering me.)
Under the cut are a few nonspecifically spoilery observations on narrative in this book. I do want to point out once again that if you like reading unspoiled, this book is best read as an unspoiled experience, and even knowing the type of some of the twists is a bit of a spoiler itself. But I'd love to talk to other people who've read it in the comments. Did it work for you? Not work? Was it a bit much? I suspect this is one of those books where its success for an individual reader (or not) depends on how completely you were willing to buy into some of its rug-pulls.
In particular, this book did a fantastic job with the kind of unreliable narrative voice in which you aren't alert for it because you don't realize there is anything to be surprised about, until you get the key pieces late in the book that make the whole thing tilt and rearrange and then you go OH! From a narrative perspective, every little mystery (aside from the big mystery of what happened to Megan) appears to have an answer. Except the surface answers aren't necessarily the true ones. I've rarely seen a book deal so deftly with giving fake answers to some of its core foundational elements while still playing entirely fair with the reader; the narrators are never directly dishonest, they're accurately reporting the facts as they experience them, it's just that either they don't have all the information and come to the wrong conclusions, or some of the facts are so obvious (to them) that they just don't need to mention them in the narration because what else would it be?
A book-breakingly spoilery bit, therefore rot13'd: Bs gur inevbhf gjvfgf va gur obbx gung znxr lbh tb onpx naq ybbx ng gur rneyvre cnegf qvssreragyl, V guvax gur bar V yvxrq orfg vf gung, orpnhfr bs ure oynpxbhgf, Enpury qbrfa'g unir npghny zrzbevrf bs n ybg bs gur riragf bs ure yvsr; nyy fur xabjf vf jung bgure crbcyr gbyq ure unccrarq. Fb Enpury erpbhagf gurfr riragf nf snpgf orpnhfr fur unf ab ernfba gb fhfcrpg gurl'er abg, naq va snpg rira Enpury urefrys (ng svefg) qbrfa'g ernyvmr gung fur'f bsgra gryyvat hf nobhg guvatf fur rkcrevraprq svefgunaq gung fur qvqa'g npghnyyl rkcrevrapr orpnhfr fur erpbafgehpgrq gurz yngre sebz bgure crbcyr'f nppbhagf. Vg'f irel qrsgyl qbar, nf ner fbzr pyrireyl qvfthvfrq cebabha/nagrprqrag genafvgvbaf va bgure crbcyr'f CBI frpgvbaf.
If you like completely unspoiled reading experiences, you should probably stop reading now! The rest of this post outside the cut is not hugely spoilery, but does orient you and give you an overview of what the book is about and some of its major narrative tropes. And this is a book that rewards a "the less you know" approach, if you're particularly into that.
Due to the subject matter, the book deals heavily with alcoholism and with an alcoholic trying to quit and frequently relapsing, so if those are issues for you, this book (and perhaps this post) probably will be too.
If you're okay with knowing a bit ahead of time, read on!
In particular I liked what the book did with narration. It moves in jerky, nonlinear chunks, but this works beautifully for the voice of the primary narrator, Rachel, who is an alcoholic. We rarely see Rachel drunk; instead we get her piecing together what she did afterwards, not her actions in the moment but the morning-after regrets in which she looks back on what she did and tries to fit it to a linear timeline and interpret what happened to her. There are also several other first-person narrators, but all the sections are labeled and timestamped so it's not hard to follow (though sometimes it does help to move back and forth between recent narrative sections to get the full picture of where everyone was at any given time).
Rachel lost her husband and her job to her drinking, but doesn't want her roommate to know she was fired, so she still takes the commuter train every day and then spends the day wandering aimlessly, going to bars, and drunkenly stalking her ex-husband and his new family. During these trips, the commuter train goes right past her old neighborhood, and she becomes obsessed with her husband's new next-door neighbors, a beautiful young couple who seem to have the perfect family life Rachel used to have before her life blew up in her face. She invents names and fictional lives for them. And then the wife goes missing, during a night in which Rachel, blackout-drunk, knows that she visited her old neighborhood. She wakes up covered in blood (hers? someone else's?) with no idea what happened, only that it was something bad. And she has to piece together the events of that night, for both her own sake and that of the missing woman.
Despite the fundamental unlikability of some of her actions, I really liked Rachel; she is clearly a lost, miserable person trying to grope her way out of addiction and grief for her failed marriage. The fact that most of the other characters also dislike her helped with the sympathy -- from inside her head, you can see exactly why she does what she does, but from the outside they've got a point that she comes across as a delusional stalker. So you move back and forth between Rachel as a genuinely well-intentioned person who is trying her not-so-great best to help, and Rachel as she's coming across to others while she's doing this: as basically a psycho stalker ex from hell. (I think the only thing I really disliked about the outside POV sections on Rachel is the occasional focus on her weight. Rachel is fat, and is often negatively compared to thin characters for no good reason. Usually it's clearly meant to show shallow, nasty facets of the narrator. But it happened often enough that it started bothering me.)
Under the cut are a few nonspecifically spoilery observations on narrative in this book. I do want to point out once again that if you like reading unspoiled, this book is best read as an unspoiled experience, and even knowing the type of some of the twists is a bit of a spoiler itself. But I'd love to talk to other people who've read it in the comments. Did it work for you? Not work? Was it a bit much? I suspect this is one of those books where its success for an individual reader (or not) depends on how completely you were willing to buy into some of its rug-pulls.
In particular, this book did a fantastic job with the kind of unreliable narrative voice in which you aren't alert for it because you don't realize there is anything to be surprised about, until you get the key pieces late in the book that make the whole thing tilt and rearrange and then you go OH! From a narrative perspective, every little mystery (aside from the big mystery of what happened to Megan) appears to have an answer. Except the surface answers aren't necessarily the true ones. I've rarely seen a book deal so deftly with giving fake answers to some of its core foundational elements while still playing entirely fair with the reader; the narrators are never directly dishonest, they're accurately reporting the facts as they experience them, it's just that either they don't have all the information and come to the wrong conclusions, or some of the facts are so obvious (to them) that they just don't need to mention them in the narration because what else would it be?
A book-breakingly spoilery bit, therefore rot13'd: Bs gur inevbhf gjvfgf va gur obbx gung znxr lbh tb onpx naq ybbx ng gur rneyvre cnegf qvssreragyl, V guvax gur bar V yvxrq orfg vf gung, orpnhfr bs ure oynpxbhgf, Enpury qbrfa'g unir npghny zrzbevrf bs n ybg bs gur riragf bs ure yvsr; nyy fur xabjf vf jung bgure crbcyr gbyq ure unccrarq. Fb Enpury erpbhagf gurfr riragf nf snpgf orpnhfr fur unf ab ernfba gb fhfcrpg gurl'er abg, naq va snpg rira Enpury urefrys (ng svefg) qbrfa'g ernyvmr gung fur'f bsgra gryyvat hf nobhg guvatf fur rkcrevraprq svefgunaq gung fur qvqa'g npghnyyl rkcrevrapr orpnhfr fur erpbafgehpgrq gurz yngre sebz bgure crbcyr'f nppbhagf. Vg'f irel qrsgyl qbar, nf ner fbzr pyrireyl qvfthvfrq cebabha/nagrprqrag genafvgvbaf va bgure crbcyr'f CBI frpgvbaf.
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That's really nice.
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Enpury qbrfa'g unir npghny zrzbevrf bs n ybg bs gur riragf bs ure yvsr; nyy fur xabjf vf jung bgure crbcyr gbyq ure unccrarq. Fb Enpury erpbhagf gurfr riragf nf snpgf orpnhfr fur unf ab ernfba gb fhfcrpg gurl'er abg, naq va snpg rira Enpury urefrys (ng svefg) qbrfa'g ernyvmr gung fur'f bsgra gryyvat hf nobhg guvatf fur rkcrevraprq svefgunaq gung fur qvqa'g npghnyyl rkcrevrapr orpnhfr fur erpbafgehpgrq gurz yngre sebz bgure crbcyr'f nppbhagf. Vg'f irel qrsgyl qbar, nf ner fbzr pyrireyl qvfthvfrq cebabha/nagrprqrag genafvgvbaf va bgure crbcyr'f CBI frpgvbaf.
Gung fbhaqf ernyyl arng! V fgnegrq bhg guvaxvat guvf vf cebonoyl abg n obbx sbe zr, ohg guvf ynfg ovg jbhyq or vagrerfgvat rabhtu sbe zr gb purpx vg bhg, cbgragvnyyl.
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V rfcrpvnyyl ybirq gur guvat jvgu gur tbys pyho. Cbbe Enpury guvaxf fur nggnpxrq Gbz jvgu n tbys pyho (gurer'f n qrag va gur jnyycncre naq rirelguvat! naq fur erzrzoref gur tbys pyho, ohg abguvat ryfr!), orpnhfr gung'f jung ur gbyq ure, naq qbrfa'g ernyvmr 'gvy yngr va gur obbx gung ur npghnyyl fjhat vg ng ure naq gura yvrq nobhg vg.
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♥