EMMA IN THE NIGHT – WENDY WALKER

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Emma in the Night by Wendy Walker
My rating: 3/5 cats

this is a psychological suspense novel about two sisters; fifteen-year-old cass and seventeen-year-old emma martin, who vanish one night from their affluent connecticut neighborhood. three years later, cass returns, ringing the doorbell of her old home, whereupon she is surrounded by family, police, doctors, the media, and dr. winter, the forensic psychologist who has been obsessed with their case since the girls disappeared, all wanting to know what happened that night and where emma is.

in a real-world scenario, this book would be three pages long: girl comes home, girl tells story, police do their thing.

but that would be a boring book.

this is one of those novels more geared towards reader-manipulation and drawing out suspense than it is in procedural realism. which is not a criticism—that’s what fans of psychological suspense want—they want the experience of being cat-and-moused by the story, where answers are withheld and doled out sparingly for maximum drama. and this book definitely keeps a reader invested in the questions and turning those pages eagerly to figure out what really happened.

in that prosaic real-world, cass would stumble home and tell the police exactly what’s happened to her and how to rescue her sister, wanting to see justice done. in the world of this book, cass takes DAYS to tell her story, going off on long affectless tangents with seemingly irrelevant details, paging casually through photo albums and refusing to speak without her mother present, although she takes no comfort from her presence, and just really taking her time making with the details about where her sister is. and without giving away spoilers, i will quote from the synopsis above—dr. winter, who has been involved in the investigation since day one, realizes from cass’ explanation that: something doesn’t add up, seeing the shape of a story underneath the one cass is telling, so she has to put it all together herself—what she’s being told, what she’s being “told” through subtext, insinuation, and omission, what she observed from the family when she was investigating the case years ago, and the convenient perspective she has on the situation from her own personal experiences.

you have to be willing to suspend disbelief and enjoy the story as a machine, because none of it would work with even a single cog or ball bearing out of alignment, and the odds are against this coincidence-laden situation happening naturally, but as a piece of entertainment constructed meticulously by an author, the journey to discovering the truth is a fun ride. that’s not to say you still won’t have questions at the end.

real spoilery questions you should stay away from unless you’ve already read the book:

View Spoiler »because, cass really does put a lot of faith in a stranger’s ability to interpret subtext, or even identify that there is subtext to be interpreted. and it’s a bit of a reach that she would understand her own victimology well enough to know that her counting-of-minutes was common to children of narcissistic parents and that dr. winter would recognize that her omission of the time frame of the birth and the journey would appear fishy and lead her to the truth. and that cass would have any trust in strangers after what she’s been through. and keeping in mind that eighteen-year-old cass has been out of the world and basically homeschooled for the past three years while undergoing the stress of being held captive and isn’t schooled in psychology or law enforcement or forensics and is probably out of the habit of communicating with people who aren’t holding her hostage, by her own admission: After so many years of being powerless, of having no voice, of having no one hear me, I was overwhelmed, she seems to be preternaturally capable of carrying on two conversations at once, constructing an elaborate lie on top of a truth that still leads to the same investigative end. it’s all a bit flimsy. and why go through this whole calculated ruse anyway? because mrs. martin’s a good liar and the truth wouldn’t be believed? because she wants to see her mother squirm? let her squirm in jail. there’s no indication that jonathan is as accomplished a dissembler as her mother, apart from covering up an affair, but that requires no prevaricating mastermind, so if it was just about finding emma’s body, between forensics and her eyewitness testimony and some targeted interrogation, you’d think it would have been easier than this whole long charade while the people who actually did hold her for all those years are being given time to vanish and police and federal agents are working around the clock on this wild goose chase, preventing them from investigating other crimes. and why lead police to the house (eventually) at all? the pratts won’t be there, and it can incriminate cass in the boatman’s murder. why leave that necklace? just to make jonathan go dig up the body to prove to mrs. martin that he took care of it for realz? seems risky, with all the scrutiny they are under, with media and police camping out. and, pathology and need for attention aside, why would her mother make such a spectacular media fuss when the girls first went missing when she was in such a precarious place and an investigation could have been very bad, indeed, for her, considering how known it was that their family was a toxic mess and witt’s assertion that she is evil and all. there was so much evidence of the volatility in that house, i don’t think a little pot use by owen would be enough to undermine credibility. etc etc etc « Hide Spoiler.

if you ignore all of the “but wait…”s, it’s a really suspenseful journey of discovery. there are a lot of similarities to this book and Good as Gone, in terms of premise and slow-reveal, and there are some nice internal moments from cass as she tries to reacclimate to her old life and fulfill her agenda:

I knew they wanted to zap me into their world, magically transform me into the daughter I would have been if I had never left, the young woman who held their history the way family does, living every mundane moment together. But I could not absorb it the way they needed me to. I felt detached, like a stranger eavesdropping on the train. I did not want to be in the present with them – not without Emma, not without justice. Until I had those things, I would not let them distract me with their stories from their normal lives.

but—note to cass—you really could get your justice more quickly if you abandoned this whole stringing-along thing you’re doing. just sayin’.

there’s one other reservation, and that’s with the overall writing style. i had read the author’s debut All Is Not Forgotten, and the narrative voice there was a very detached first-person, kind of humbert humberty without the…proclivities, and i figured it was just a tic of that character, but now i think it’s more of an authorial tic. although it is much softer than the voice of AINF, there’s still something of the clinically detached here. there are some moments when cass skews purple:

Waves of elation and dread rolled through my body like the ocean, each one crashing against a wall and giving way to the next.

but even her purple seems stilted.

it’s largely told in one big exposition-heavy recitation, from both of the POV characters. for a book so much about psychology, there’s little of it shown, much told. or taught. there’s plenty of diagnosis—we learn about several disorders, but in clinical terms, without much insight, or insights that read more like notes from case studies than these supposedly living, breathing characters. in one of cass’ POV chapters:

…Dr. Winter told us that she had been working around the clock, tracking down her list of people from the past, people who might know something about the Pratts or View Spoiler »Emma’s pregnancy « Hide Spoiler. She had already spoken with some teachers and friends of both girls. They had all heard about Cass’s return and the desperate search for Emma, though so far none of them had anything to add that was helpful. They had been shocked to hear the truth about why we left home.

the use of “both girls” and “cass” in an otherwise first-person account is a bit alienating, pushing the reader out of first person and at arm’s length.

there are occasional bursts of description that really work:

I think there are two types of people. Ones who have a scream inside them and ones who don’t. People who have a scream are too angry or too sad or laugh too hard, swear too much, use drugs or never sit still. Sometimes they sing at the top of their lungs with the windows rolled down. I don’t think people are born with it. I think other people put it inside you with the things they do to you, and say to you, or the things you see them do or say to other people. And I don’t think you can get rid of it. If you don’t have a scream, you can’t understand.

but the bulk of the novel is told in a voice that keeps the reader at a distance.

i enjoyed reading the book, for sure, but i think it’s one of those books whose enjoyment will fade a bit over time. most of my ratings on here are four-stars cats, and when i am going through my shelves here for whatever reason, i am frequently surprised at some of the books i have given four stars cats to. i think a lot of times i feel more positively about a book in the immediate aftermath, and then once the experience merges into the backdrop of “all the things i have read,” many of those four stars cats are probably closer to threes. All Is Not Forgotten was a 3.5 rounded up, this one is a 3.5 rounded down, just for balance. both books are enjoyable, and excellent summer-reading material, but they’re definitely more fruity pebbles than oatmeal.

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