Lew's Book Reviews

How do you write about unbearable suffering without your writing becoming insufferable or unbearable?

If you’re Carolyn Ferrell, you do it with a combination of dazzling pyrotechnics and sucker punches to the gut. Imagine a three-way collaboration between Thomas Harris, Vladimir Nabokov, and Richard Pryor. And if you think that sounds nuts, wait till halfway through the book when Ferrell starts flashing forward to the year 2039.

The plot deals with the kidnapping of three barely pubescent girls in 1999 by a psychopath who calls himself Boss Man. They are raped, starved, and tortured. For ten years.

Let that sink in for a minute.

When the cops finally show up, one of the three “girls”–now women–is missing, and in her place is her infant daughter. All three will spend the next thirty years–and presumably more–trying to make sense of what happened to them.

You can feel Farrell’s glee as she smashes the Rules of Fiction as if they were plate-glass windows. The novel careens through time and space, from character to character to documents and photographs and poems. Here it wanders into the weeds to read a 31-page transcription of one character’s answers to a 26-part questionnaire (we never see the questions). Elsewhere it swoops into the consciousness of the titular Miss Metropolitan, advice columnist long past her relevance, who just happened to live across the street from the abandoned building where the girls were kept chained up.

And speaking of Miss Metropolitan, she gives voice to one of the many entirely serious questions that Farrell raises. How, she wonders, could she have walked past those girls every day for ten years? (As, of course, all of us unknowingly walk past women being tortured everywhere.)

And so, in her bumbling attempt to make up for her inaction, Miss Metropolitan becomes the apotheosis of all the well- (and not so well) meaning do-gooders who are drawn irresistibly to the victims. Like “TV’s Dr. Ezra”–unfailingly referred to by that tripartite designation–who shows up in the wake of the ambulance, looking for a ratings boost. Or the genuinely kind, and over-aptly named social worker, Ms. Refuge.

Everyone was trying to communicate. Doctors from other hospitals. Nurses with girls at home like us. Firemen who’d taken up a collection. An elementary school in Bayside that had written a bag of letters. A school in the Bronx, one in Alphabet City. More doctors. Police officers with girls at home like us. One or two retired school teachers. Pastors. Rabbis. General Rabble of God. But also people that didn’t believe in God. People that blamed God. Everyone trying to impart something. A lesson, a hope, a regret, a condemnation. What are they saying, Gwinnie whispered, her eyes as wide as proverbial flying saucers. We’d been in the picnic chair hospital for just over fourteen Mickey Mouse calendar days. Try listening, I said back. They’re forming words. We can learn their language if we try.

The first sentence, repeated over and over: What he did, girls, was wrong.

Second sentence: You are the real victims here, no matter what.

Good lord, Gwinnie said. I thought they were saying something new.

I’m not going to recommend DEAR MISS METROPOLITAN to everyone. Some might feel that its moments of zany humor trivialize the seriousness of the characters’ suffering. We never learn Boss Man’s origin story, or his eventual fate. The central “mystery” of the missing third victim is never fully tied up. In short, the more you want this book to resemble a conventional suspense novel, the more disappointed you’re likely to be.

On the other hand, if you can handle sitting in the passenger seat while a novelist drunk on her own brilliance rams the gas pedal through the floorboards, DEAR MISS METROPOLITAN might be just what you didn’t know you were looking for.

If you read a lot of “psychological thrillers” you will recognize many of these elements: the damaged first-person narrator; the alcoholic and negligent mother; the abusive stepfather; the alternating narrative lines, one in the past, one in the present; the catastrophic event that is hinted at long before it’s revealed in the narrative (e.g. page 3: “‘…even after,’ she paused, ‘everything that happened.'”).

Debut novelist Victoria Gosling whips these familiar ingredients into something completely unexpected, rich, satisfying, and full of pain and truth.

Here’s as much plot as I’m willing to give away: Four friends in their late teens meet at an abandoned manor in rural England in the summer of 1996 to play games, most of them involving a diamond necklace supposedly hidden there. Andy, our damaged narrator, shows what past tense can do that present tense can’t, as her bitter, hilarious, powerful, and vulnerable voice filters everything we see and hear. Peter, always an outsider, is headed for Oxford. Andy’s boyfriend Marcus is destined for a career in his uncle’s construction business. Em, sweet and idealistic, follows where the others lead. When David–handsome, charming, dangerous–arrives, on the run from the law, the entire course of the summer changes. Meanwhile, twenty years on, Peter has disappeared and long-buried secrets are clamoring to get out.

The plot is riveting, and not in the teasing, deliberately-withheld-information sort of way you see in lesser thrillers. I felt like Andy was getting to all the bits of the story as quickly as she could–there’s just a lot to tell. Through pitch-perfect dialog, each of the characters comes vividly to life, and despite their lies, betrayals, and stoned and drunken carelessness, I loved them all. Andy’s acute self-awareness is her most humanizing feature: “I knew I was playing an old game, threatening to do something dangerous in the hope that someone would stop me.” No one does. Instead, as Peter tells her late in the book, “I have resented you at times. Things came easy to you, Andy. People always liked you. Didn’t matter how rude or appalling you were.” That this is not how Andy saw herself is part of what makes the novel so vivid and so real–we are constantly seeing the characters from new angles.

You can’t open the book without finding a moment of brilliant writing, whether a snarky one-liner (“My mum had an eight-octave emotional range and more black keys than most”) or a moment of natural beauty (“A little starlight crept through the new leaves. I thought of dead stars, dead events, all their rage consumed millions of years ago, just a memory of fire reaching out across the universe…”). Rage is never far from Andy’s thoughts, and her slow coming to grips with it is one of the many threads that propelled me through the book.

In her low moments, Andy finds her rage everywhere, like when she binge-watches action films “for the explosions, the moments when the whole screen was a consuming, raging fire, and for the fight scenes, in which bad men were eventually overcome with maximum force. The fights were like beautiful dances rising toward climax, the body count swelling as Vin, or The Rock, Jason or Bruce, snapped and stabbed and choked, punching and ripping and slamming and gouging bad men toward unconsciousness or death, their faces flushed and contorted with the effort of it. The violence always justified. A wife murdered. A child held hostage. But the women and children merely ciphers, excuses for the violence unleashed.”

Nor is she the only one to suffer. Marcus feels trapped in his role as “white knight” and protector. Peter is tormented at Oxford for his sexuality and his middle-class origins. Em spends a lifetime in unrequited love. Yet none of them is defined by pain, and all of them are given complex emotional lives. There is no part for Vin Diesel in the movie of BEFORE THE RUINS. The violence that happens is sudden, unexpected, and takes place offstage.

I knew I had only skimmed the surface in my first reading, and as soon as I finished the book I turned back to page 1 and started again, savoring every line, all the way through, with even more pleasure than the first time. I have never done that with a book before, but it more than repaid the effort. In the very first paragraph, I saw that Gosling had quietly prepared the ground for a plot point we would not see explained for more than 200 pages. The odd way that Peter’s former schoolmate at Oxford teased him about “what he was capable of,” meaningless the first time, was chilling on rereading. A minor quibble I had about the diamond subplot turned out to be me in too much of a hurry the first time through.

I cannot recommend this novel highly enough. Donna Tartt’s SECRET HISTORY, Julia Heaberlin’s WE ARE ALL THE SAME IN THE DARK, and Abigail Dean’s GIRL A offer points of comparison, but BEFORE THE RUINS tops them all.

The trendy use of the word “girl” in the title, the ominous photo on the dust jacket, the drastic shifts in fictive time, the brutal cult at the center of the story–all these hallmarks signal a psychological suspense novel on the order of LONG BRIGHT RIVER or WE ARE ALL ALONE IN THE DARK. Instead, this harrowing and beautifully written narrative is about the cost of surviving devastating trauma.

Thanks to the aforementioned time shifts, we get the basics of the plot in the first few pages: seven siblings, a father slipping ever further into religious derangement, an acquiescent mother, the “House of Horrors” in which they lived. When the oldest daughter escapes and the crime scene is revealed, authorities make a half-hearted attempt to control the media frenzy by assigning the children code names in order of age: Girl A, B, and C; Boys A-D.

Girl A, once called Lex, is the first-person narrator, and after sketching the broad outlines of the story, she spends the rest of the novel coloring inside those lines. If suspense had been Dean’s goal, telling the events in chronological order would have done the trick. Instead she seems intent on more elusive psychological game.

Each of the seven children had a unique experience of captivity, and each was damaged in a different way. Dean shows us how each can perform competence and normalcy while hiding essential brokenness. It’s the mere glimpses we get of that brokenness that suggest its unimaginable depths.

This is an extraordinarily accomplished and intelligent first novel, and I’m eager to see where Dean goes from here.