You by Caroline Kepnes
My rating: 4/5 cats
…the problem with books is that they end. They seduce you. They spread their legs to you and pull you inside. And you go deep and leave your possessions and your ties to the world at the door and you like it inside and you don’t want for your possessions or your ties and then, the book evaporates.
this was recommended to me by eeeeeveryone a few years back when it seemed a little cult was being formed around this book, and i’d been meaning to read it for a long time; so long, in fact, that i’d forgotten i had already bought a digital copy on my NOOK and then much later went out and bought a paperback copy like a fool. and when i found myself conscripted for jury duty and in need of something that was going to be entertaining enough to block out the noise of the game shows they play so loudly in the jury duty waiting room (WHY DO YOU DO THIS, JURY DUTY, WHYYYY??), i figured this would be a good choice, and i could finally see what all the fuss was about.
and it absolutely delivered what i needed – family feud did not stand a chance against this extremely immersive tale of obsession and crime and unpleasant people colliding.
however, all of you people who told me i was going to “fall in love with joe,” you have officially lost all rights to set me up on blind dates should i ever require that sort of service. and if you yourself fell in love with him, i think i should stage an intervention on you. because while he is certainly … devoted to the object of his desire, he’s pretty shitty boyfriend material. yes, i appreciate that he’s a bookperson, and there’s appeal to someone whose declarations of love are so in line with my own interests:
I want to bring you all the books in the world…
and i appreciate some of his observations and attitudes, but all the window-peeping and social media violations and kidnapping and murder and desperate neediness tied to email and text response-time – those are less attractive qualities when i’m looking for a mate.
although he’s not wrong about some things, and we could probably be friends, if not lovers:
–Work in a bookstore and learn that most people in this world feel guilty about being who they are.
–If people could handle their self-loathing, customer service would be smoother.
–Life at IKEA is not like life at IKEA in the movies.
–What’s the only thing more sexless than lunch? Brunch, a meal invented by rich white chicks to rationalize day drinking and bingeing on French toast.
although i had to HHMPH at his comment about rhode island:
(nowhere is far from anywhere in a state this small)
i also really like the fact that he has no illusions about beck; he acknowledges her many flaws and his ‘love’ for her is clear-eyed without any pedestal idealization:
–You tweet more often than you write and this could be why you’re getting your MFA from the New School and not from Columbia.
–…I know you so well, Beck. You are charisma, you are sick, and for some reason you are a magnet for weak, spineless people…
the best thing about this book is its breezy tone. it’s not an intense nailbiting horror story of an innocent woman victimized by a deluded stalker who believes they are cosmically meant to be. beck is such a shitty person, you never really see her as a victim, and since this is told in second person, through joe’s perspective, it’s easy to sympathize with him despite his many transgressions. even in its darkest scenes, it’s a funny book, very reminiscent of bret easton ellis, who is winkingly referenced within the text along with many many other books; another reason this is so popular with all the booknerds. we do love our own kind.
apart from the humor and the booksnark, i enjoyed kepnes’ treatment of social class and stratification. i know, zzzzzzz, right? and it’s only a minor point, but i was struck by beck’s sort of trickle-down slummery; she’s from nantucket, known for inspiring rude limericks and, like most island or coastal locales in new england, home to a wildly uneven distribution of wealth between its townie and tourist populations. beck is one of the former:
You hail from farmers and you’re fond of saying that you don’t have “a place” on Nantucket, but that your family made a home there.
and yet her friendships and relationships are with those far wealthier; toxic people like peach and benji, who embody the “careless people” that populate The Great Gatsby:
You are the townie and Benji is the tourist who literally enters you and uses you as a vacation from the wear and tear of the artisanal club soda business only to dump you before Labor Day… Your emotional livelihood is a demented seasonal economy where Labor Day is every other fucking day.
and
He rents you out, the same way he rents loft space on SoBro (South Bronx to those of us who don’t need to make up bullshit pet names for neighborhoods where we’re not wanted.)
but with joe, the solidly middle-class beck is the one dating down – with a bookstore clerk from bed-stuy sneered at by peach for his humble background:
“I read that people are starting to move there,” she says. “I hope gentrification doesn’t destroy all the local color.”
wealth isn’t a major preoccupation in the book, but it surfaces in interesting ways, particularly for those of us all-too-familiar with the careless values of the easily-monied young new arrivals to these fine boroughs, foisting their pickleback shots and novelty club sodas upon us and steadily driving up our rents. and joe’s… interactions with them are wholly satisfying and another reason to applaud this antihero.
it’s a really fun book. i don’t think i loved it quite as much as the rabid joe cultists, but it was very engrossing, darkly funny, surprising, and truly entertaining.
it was also much more erotic than i’d been anticipating, which became a bit awkward when i realized the woman sitting next to me in our jury duty limbo was totally reading along with me during one of these saucy parts and i wanted to shout “IT’S NOT PORN!! IT’S JUST THIS ONE PART!!! JUST WATCH THE FAMILY FEUD, YA PERV!”
i’m looking forward to reading Hidden Bodies.
