Book #65 of 2024:
Dream Girl by Laura Lippman
This 2021 thriller feels like a take on Stephen King’s Misery for the #metoo era, in which a bedridden white male writer is held accountable and ultimately held captive by an overbearing nurse figure for the sins of his past, oblivious to most of them though he is. Strictly speaking, the beginning of the novel aims for some ambiguity — are the strange phone calls the protagonist is receiving perhaps mere hallucinations, brought on by either the pills he’s taking or the genetic predisposition for his mother’s dementia? That would explain why the voice is impossibly claiming to be a character from one of his books who’s famous for being abused by an older lover (or the secret inspiration behind her in his own life, despite his insistence that no such person exists). But the genre conventions make it pretty likely that someone’s gaslighting him instead, and the circumstances around the messages point to the culprit well before he reaches that conclusion himself.
Author Laura Lippman plays a difficult game here, rendering a hero who’s significantly flawed by design and asking us to nevertheless invest in his struggle. Gerry Andersen is casually racist, sexist, homophobic, and beyond, while of course inwardly complaining that the world has just grown too sensitive for a man like him to navigate. It’s similar to the stunt that R. F. Kuang pulls with the narrator in Yellowface, but in my opinion, that later title achieves a greater success in balancing the despicability of its lead with the needs of the larger plot and its driving themes. Here, the twists aren’t frequent or surprising enough, and the straits never seem particularly dire. Everything in the story falls out more or less as expected, which leaves me a bit lukewarm overall.
[Content for incest, rape, and gore.]
★★★☆☆
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