I haven’t read very much at all this year; distressing work news in an absolute shitshow of a job market in my field has affected my concentration somewhat. So have I bought a lot of books? Yes. Do I read them? I try? Between finally watching Succession (Waystar Royco is starting to seem like a utopian haven right now) and familiarising myself with the entire catalogue of Kendrick Lamar (upper management? THEY NOT LIKE US).
But I did read Megan Abbott’s Beware the Woman (2023), finally, and a couple of others, and I will try to write them up during the spring break.
I love Abbott’s Dare Me (2012) with a fierce passion, but her other books have been a bit inconsistent for me–this is a very personal thing, but I don’t like it when the main POV character doesn’t know something that the reader does at the end of a mystery. I’m fine with POV characters knowing things and nobody else knowing them, but often I think having the POV character find out the thing that is hidden and reacting to that would be more interesting than having a secret kept from them.
What Abbott does with a sublime carnivorous intensity is write about cis women’s and girls’ bodies–in Dare Me, the way the cheerleaders break themselves to make themselves stronger, pulses of blood and rage of all kinds in Give Me Your Hand (2018), and in Beware the Woman, a woman’s pregnant body, the animal instincts and spiritual anxiety of pregnancy, the body’s symbiotic relationship with the foetus, and the woman’s uneasy power dynamic with the men around her–not just in her immediate circle, but in general.
Jacy marries Jed relatively hastily; a classic noir moment ensues:
It’s not like I’m marrying a stranger, I’d told my mom over the phone, the day we went to city hall.
Honey, she said, we all marry strangers.
That’s what she said. (16)
But Jed’s strangeness only begins to become apparent when he and Jacy go to his father’s cabin in remote Michigan, Jed’s childhood home, for a summer holiday, and Jed reverts to sullen teen mode while his father, the housekeeper (definitely inspired by Mrs Danvers in du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), emphasised by the nods to her Cornish heritage), and the locals display increasingly sinister interest in the contents of Jacy’s uterus and what she should do with it.
I don’t want to spoil too much–this is different from the other Abbott novels I’ve read because of its isolated landscape setting, but it has the family tension and secrets that you expect from the genre, along with a healthy dose of medical patriarchy, although it perhaps tries a little too hard to make the secret and final reveal unexpected. Nature is atmospherically red in tooth and claw–there’s some sort of mountain feline on the loose, the sounds and smells of the landscape itself shift between beauty and hostility.
Overall I enjoyed it a lot but I didn’t love it–perhaps it’s the weight of the Rebecca influence, perhaps that there have been so many recent domestic noir novels about the tensions within a marriage that it’s difficult to find something new to say, and perhaps Abbott is better at exploding myths about other kinds of relationship, especially friendship? It’s not a bad novel, by any means–it whiled away a couple of afternoons, and again, the body stuff is, as usual visceral and excellently unsettling.
Title quote from “People Are Strange” by The Doors (1967).
