Listen to Me by Hannah Pittard
My rating: 4/5 cats
this is a hard book to review. like the road trip it recounts, it’s less about the journey than the destination. more finely put: the strength of this book is the way its ending changes the reader’s perception of everything that’s come before, and that revelation isn’t an experience i want to take away from another reader.
road trips would probably be one of the correct answers to the family feud prompt: “name something that can cause strain in a relationship.” and if the couple in question is already on shaky ground, a road trip can become a powder keg. mark and maggie had a strong marriage and reasonably happy lives until the night maggie was mugged at gunpoint and left unconscious mere blocks from their chicago apartment. she was just beginning to recover from the emotional and psychological fallout of her assault when two police officers came by with photos of a young woman found murdered nearby; a woman maggie had known in a casual neighborly way. there were similarities to both attacks, but when it became clear the the suspect in custody for the murder was not the same man who had attacked maggie; that he was still roaming free, maggie’s anxieties returned stronger than ever and she became obsessed with seeking out news stories about violent crimes, staying in her house paralyzed by fear, paranoid that every alley hid a killer. she became a fretful, anxious woman; unrecognizable to mark, who is frustrated by this woman so different from the accomplished and confident woman he fell in love with. his dissatisfaction in their marriage leaves cracks for a flirtation with another women to slip in, although he has not yet acted on this temptation.
mark hopes that their annual road trip to visit to his parents on their farm in rural virginia will allow them the space and peace to relax and take some of the pressure off their relationship.
it does not go well.
little strains cause friction from the outset: a late start, crummy roadside coffee, traffic, their dog gerome’s restlessness and anxiety; all contribute to the tension rippling under the surface of their marriage, breaking through occasionally with a snapped remark or a loaded silence, smoothed over only to reappear again as the trip progresses and the tedium and exhaustion that is part of any road trip slowly frays their nerves.
It drove Mark nuts that they had a neurotic dog. Neurotic people had neurotic dogs, and Mark was not a neurotic person. And Maggie was a vet, for Christ’s sake. It made no sense that Gerome wasn’t a more natural animal.
if animals really do mirror their owners’ behaviors, it’s clear who mark is actually frustrated with here, yeah?
the unexpected stressors escalate as the trip goes on: heavy rain and tornado warnings causing delays, detours, and blackouts, ambiguously threatening interactions with strangers, less ambiguously threatening interactions with aggressive drivers, and the narrative becomes an exercise in slowly simmering dramatic tension, where ordinary situations are given an ominous slant, like this lynchian scene that takes place in a rest stop bathroom:
It was a childish habit – checking under all the doors in a public washroom to make sure someone wasn’t lurking – because what would Maggie do if she actually found someone? Scream? Fight back? Wilt? Yet she could never resist the urge.
In this particular bathroom, Maggie discovered only one pair of feet. They were at the far end of the glinty silver latrine, behind the final stall door, which was closed and, presumably, locked. And they were turned, these feet were, in the wrong direction – as if the person attached to them might be barfing or about to flush the toilet. …She was acutely aware of the sound coming from the only other compartment in use. Or, rather, she was aware of a lack of sound. Though she loathed in general the prospect of listening to another person pee (or worse), she was further loath to find herself in an enclosed space with someone who wasn’t using it for its intended purpose…
Still squatting, Maggie bent over even farther and angled herself so that she could peek – her shorts around her knees – under the partition in the direction of the far toilet. Though there were several stalls between them, she could clearly make out the feet, which were now pointed firmly facing in Maggie’s direction.
spooky, right? this tone of unease recurs frequently, in a variety of ways, and it’s an incredibly tense read for a book that’s not even 200 pages long. there’s a sense throughout of pittard pacing herself, holding back, playing with the reader who is infected by the claustrophobia in this car and in this relationship, bracing themselves for the big reveal, the big event: will it be here? will it be now? what will it be?
i wasn’t sure what kind of a book this was going into it – whether it would be a dark psychological road trip crime story like vicki pettersson’s book Swerve or the movie Breakdown, or whether it would turn into some supernatural horror story, and i don’t want to spoil your journey on that matter, but i will say it’s a strong character-driven read in which a relationship’s past and present is dissected, its participants exposed enough as characters for the reader to see both their flaws and their good intentions, so frequently unexpressed and unacted-upon, but there nonetheless, powering the shreds of the relationship and healing it over:
Sure, they’d quarreled about the luggage and maybe the last three weeks had been more strained than usual, but quarrels, as Maggie and her former therapist had discussed, were the latticework of relationships. They were the branches. They were the branches – interlacing the pattern, strengthening the structure – that sheltered them and kept them together.
and that slap of an ending which i do want to discuss, but politely, behind a spoiler warning. View Spoiler »
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it’s great how every book i read lately has one huge thing i wanna talk about but noooooooo because spoilers….
thanks for making book-reviewing more challenging, authors of the world…
