You Should Have Known

I read a lot of reviews before I purchased this book on my Kindle, and knew I was either going to enjoy it a lot or hate it, and I'd say my reaction was mostly on the enjoyable side. I loved the premise - I think a lot of the things the main character states at the beginning of the novel about how (she feels) women in bad relationships should have known things would turn sour based on things they intuited about their partners when they were first dating is dead on - I can't count the number of times a female friend or acquaintance has said something similar (or exactly the same!) to me following a bad break-up/divorce. It is patently obvious from the beginning that the main character is going to be hoisted on her own petard, so to speak, but the book was well-written enough that I was interested to see just how that was going to take place. I had no trouble believing that the man character was instantly ostracized by her "friends" after the mysterious murder of a fellow "mom" who turns out to have been involved with her husband - especially since she freely admits in the book that they aren't really friends, but rather people she needs/likes to stay "in good" with because of her family circumstances. The depiction of her friends is a bit skewed - they almost all seem like shallow, gossipy vultures, and I did have some difficulty believing that no one, especially perhaps the head of her son's school, spilled the beans about her husband's illegitimate son after her husband disappeared and was clearly a suspect in the death of his mistress, but that omission is required to move things along. The reveal at the end about her husband's family was expected, but I thought it was described well. The almost seamless acceptance of her son regarding his father's actions and personality are far-fetched - I can't imagine a child his age more or less shrugging and saying it's all OK; I feel an adverse reaction would have suited the story better. The main character's reaction to the truth is more believable - she feels like a fool, she (sort of) runs away to escape the publicity and scrutiny and begins to come to terms with the fact that "she should have known" about her husband. I did like the fact that her book was going to be published, anyway, at the end, with her as a prime example of the women she describes in it. All that said, I can understand why some people reacted negatively to the story line, because it does make the main character, who is a very intelligent woman, look foolish and naive, and this book is, in the end, just another version of "woman meets man and is taken in by him and comes to regret it", but as I said, I did enjoy the journey enough to keep reading to the end.

Page one: Grace Reinhart Sachs is in her office being interviewed and photographed for Vogue, one of many events preceding the publication of her book "You Should Have Known: Why Women Fail to Hear What the Men in Their Lives Are Telling Them." Grace is a therapist whose practice focuses on unraveling relationships. For weeks she has been surrounded by all the pros that populate the bandwagon of a major book launch, and assured her book will “snag the Zeitgeist.” She goes to a meeting in an Upper East Side apartment straight out of Architectural Digest, joining a group of expensively-tended women to finalize the details of a fundraising gala for the private school their children attend. Next, she picks up her young son for his violin lesson with an instructor who takes only the most promising students. They head home to get dinner going. Both hope Jonathan Sachs M.D., father and husband, can break free of his lucrative practice in pediatric oncology to join them.Let’s just say any problems these people have are going to fall into the category of First World Problems. Actually – and definitely worse – they’re going to have Upper East Side Problems.Korelitz has a gift for dialogue, so it was disappointing that the first third of the book was largely narrative. But I plugged along, and finally realized the author’s intention. Grace is surrounded by people in her professional, personal, and social lives, but she lives a largely solitary and disengaged life. In the early chapters, Korelitz buries Grace in the text, endlessly describing Grace’s thoughts and daily life. I was a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of words on the pages. These early chapters are a lesson in rebellion against the “Don’t Tell Us; Show Us” lesson every writing teacher preaches. It’s a bold stylistic choice, and it pays off. Grace is never off the page; other characters enter and exit only to engage with her in brief conversation. The narrative simultaneously distances us from Grace and mirrors her, as it becomes clear that Grace is equally distanced from her story and herself. She has the right house, clothes, husband, and son. She says almost all the right words to her patients. But her life is a sham, an empty shell. It is not clear if she does not realize this, or if she chooses not to acknowledge it. And it is that ambiguity which makes the story most compelling. Who amongst us is consistently clear about ourselves and our intentions?If you stick with it for 75 pages (and I skimmed a bit), you are rewarded with a tense and riveting plot and a cast of well-drawn characters. Grace finds her voice at a point when her world and almost everything she thought counted is upended. The dialogue becomes the novel’s driving force and we experience Grace in the “Show Us” mode that makes for a satisfying novel. She regains her balance when she escapes Manhattan for Upstate New York, where she and Jonathan have a summer house on a lake. (Well, of course they do.)Korelitz has written a serious and literate novel about marriage and self-knowledge, and managed to pepper it with great houses, good looking neighbors, excellent food descriptions, and a winning rescue dog. I liked it a lot!

I disliked Gone Girl because of the incessant chatter which replaced the descriptive narrative, the constant exposition spread throughout the novel that filled the gaps where suspense and tension should be, the unnecessary particulars of the boring characters mundane daily lives and yet was promised a fantastic psychological thriller by every quote on the cover of this book that quite frankly read worse due to the lack of depth or plot. There wasn't even a twist or anything to look forward to. No build-up to an exciting revelation. I didn't care about the characters because there was no story to follow. It was just constant yakking which led nowhere. I'm disappointed I wasted an hour devouring the first two chapters and skim-reading the rest to see if anything actually happened that could have caused the publisher to categorise this literay-ish novel about nothing as a psychological thriller and was annoyed it didn't.

I found this book so badly written it was laughable. Here is a typical exert 'and then, in a location so deep inside her that she had not known of its existence, really, let alone it's whereabouts, something heavy and metallic chose this moment to creak the tiniest bit open, with a grating of rust and the release of a new, terrible thought: that everything rising around her was about to converge' I think the author is trying to be clever, but it is just ludicrous. I felt I was being lectured in the first chapter (was the author a teacher at some point?). The main character did not ring true. I do not recommend this book at all.

Having been fooled a time too often by glowing reviews, I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was in fact a very readable book and I'm delighted to have discovered this author. More a comedy of manners than a thriller, it offers a glimpse into the life of a rich priviledged woman living in Manhatton with - she thinks - the perfect job, perfect child and perfect marriage. Though likeable, Grace is a little bit too smug, the kind of heroine you secretly long to see taken down a peg or too, especially since she has written a book called 'You should have known' which lectures less fortunate women on their relationship choices, and their failure to notice clear red flags right from the start. As it happens there were clear red flags when Grace met her seemingly ideal husband which she ignored - (IMO the truth is that it's perfectly easy to see this kind of thing in other people's relationship, virtually impossible when it's your own life). At times it is a little long winded and I feared that it was going to have one of those awful ambiguous endings but it fact it does offer closure and the first thing I did on finishing it was to start read it again. Definitely a keeper and I only wish there were more books from this writer available on kindle.

This utterly brilliant novel will be familiar, at least for a while, to anyone who saw The Undoing. Sadly the serialisation did no justice to the book (which I first read years ago): it’s not as bad as the film version of Admission, but it departed a long way from the book and for no good reason. It even left out the central irony of the novel. In essence then, this is a wonderful book, carefully crafted and incredibly observant, about a woman who comes to realize her husband is a psychopath and a murderer. That makes it sound melodramatic and messy: it’s not in the least. For anyone who likes Meg Wolitzer and Donna Tartt - read this, you’ll love it!

In all honesty I can’t see how this book got picked up to be made into a series. I can only say they took the bare bones and enriched it into another storyline which is much better. I found the book tedious and not a good read at all. I prefer the series.