The Silent Wife

Is The Silent Wife by A.S.A. Harrison indeed better than Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl? This is the question I posed to myself as I read based on the quote by Sophie Hannah, author of The Other Woman's House. Hannah put out there that this novel was a "must read," and other critics called it "deliciously wicked" and "a chilling portrait of a relationship gone terribly awry." 

Here is my answer: The Silent Wife shines and indeed goes above what Gone Girl was able to deliver. I have always lamented the endings of Flynn's novels - they always feel short to me, cut off, almost as if the author got tired of writing and said "here you go! The ending! Now I'm done." The Silent Wife has a coming down after what I consider to be the ending. We have closure and a release after the climax hits, as opposed to a hurried and rushed finality. 

This isn't a spoiler because the fact I'm about to present you with is revealed to the reader on page four of the book. Meet Todd Gilbert and Jodi Brett. They are not married in the traditional sense, meaning they never actually walked down the aisle and said their "I Do's," but the two of them have been together in what they consider a common-law marriage for twenty years. Jodi Brett is often called Mrs. Gilbert, and she cooks, cares for, and keeps life easy for her husband. By easy I mean to say that she knows full well that he is a cheater, and she allows this with the idea that all men cheat on their wives somehow. By staying silent she keeps his love. She is a counseling psychologist and Todd is an entrepreneur who flips/builds buildings. 

On page four it is revealed to us that the relationship between these two is disintegrating. "Her notions about who she is and how she ought to conduct herself are far less stable than she supposes, given that a few short months are all it will take to make a killer out of her." Jodi Brett will kill her husband. At this point we do not know how she will accomplish this but we read the book knowing and expecting it to happen. 

The Silent Wife is similar to Gone Girl in that there are "him" and "her" chapters. We get the story from both sides of the conflict. We hear their own personal discontents with their marriage, and in both novels neither couple has children (at first). Both books make us at points hate each character individually, although in this book I always hated Todd Gilbert more than I did his wife. Jodi is a therapist (as I mentioned) who only takes what she can handle. She doesn't do cases with clients who have eating disorders or more serious issues - she keeps the "crazies" at bay, preferring to not worry about a potential suicide or such. The story itself is told in third person - their dialogue is the only genuine insight we get from them, otherwise there's a narrator who tells us about what "she" and "he" are going through. 

A main theme in this book is the roles of men and women, and should women become domesticated and allow their husbands to roam as long as they come back at night? "And yet, none of this matters. It simply doesn't matter that time and time again he gives the game away, because he knows and she knows that he's a cheater, and he knows that she knows, but the point is that the pretense, the all-important pretense must be maintained, the illusion that everything is fine and nothing is the matter." Jodi Brett, and in a way Todd as well, are in constant denial. As long as the facts are maintained and their routines are kept up, the two of them for a long time believe that things can keep going on the way that they are. This is until Todd gets a rush of excitement as he finds out that his twenty-something girlfriend on the side is pregnant and thus demanding him to move out and leave Jodi with nothing - and remember she's not entitled to anything, because in all actuality the two are not married. Dilemmas ensue. 

Before the bottom falls out from underneath her, Jodi believes in her clinical sense that you must accept someone for who they are, their faults, their idiosyncrasies and not try to change them. "Other people are not here to fill our needs or meet our expectations, nor will they always treat us well. Failure to accept this will generate feelings of anger and resentment. Peace of mind comes with taking people as they are and emphasizing the positive." We realize early on that Jodi has suppressed a lot of things from her childhood, and now she suppresses the negatives, the untidy parts, of her relationship in the hopes that if she can ignore the glaring grease spots on the otherwise tidy glistening counter of her relationship she can survive. In my opinion, it is this suppression that leads her to losing her mind over the inevitable grief that follows in the repetitive blows dealt to her by the man she loved for so long, and in the stupidity she feels as she recognizes that she should have sucked up her pride and married him long ago. In trying to protect herself by not getting married, she doomed herself to landing in a sticky situation with no security. 

Todd calls Jodi a "cold dish of porridge in bed," but claims that he can accept her faults as she keeps his life nice and neat and provides him with comforts such as an always homemade dinner and a clean house, and no angry yelling or pointed questions about his weekend "fishing" trips and late night "dinners" with "colleagues." Todd truly believes that a "fling" on the side is nothing worth fretting about. Early in their relationship he made a comment to Jodi that didn't seem to raise her alarms. He stated that "Monogamy wasn't designed for men. Or men weren't designed for monogamy ... all men cheat sooner or later, one way or another. My father [an alcoholic] cheated with the bottle." Another theme in this novel is your childhood informing your adult self. Todd believes cheating is okay, because all men do it. When he was a kid he knew that his father loved his booze more than his family, but everyone dealt with it. 

With the revelation of his girlfriend's pregnancy, Todd starts to realize that his perfect double life is going awry. He compares his two women to one another. If only she was more like her, etc. He is selfish and idiotic, but in a way, so is Jodi. To get him back all this years, Jodi commits little misdemeanors against him. She is silently vindictive and does things to him that hurt him but he never traces it back to her - such as throwing his cell phone into the lake when he's drunk, drugging his milkshakes, or stealing his keys. It soon becomes evident that Jodi is a crazy methodical bitch, and she doesn't even realize how calculating and dangerous she is. She excels at discreet retaliation that punishes Todd just enough to make her feel satiated. The two of them are deranged. They are in denial and try to give themselves personal affirmations of their own sanity. 

Jodi's weapon in the novel is indeed her silence. Her silence is dense and purposeful; it is a barricade against anything that could hurt her. 

This is truly the first suspenseful suspense novel that I have ever read. It raises your blood pressure and then brings it back down as you can finally breathe once you realize that the end has not come too soon. You will find yourself wanting the death of Todd Gilbert to be painful and incredibly slow as realization creeps across his face in his final moments, and that wish may or may not be denied you. You won't be sure until the end. This brought out the ugly in me, but I'd read it again and relish the feeling of losing my own clarity as the novel continues. In the end I felt satisfied and only wish I had more. My only commentary is that it would be nice to someday read a book like this where the woman becomes the cheating bastard and the man suffers from financial and emotional deprivation. I have yet to come upon a novel that serves me up that treat in such a way as this - long-suffering pain and repressed urges that erupt in a blunt and bitter end - where the woman is the one we despise more-so than the man. 

As the book states, "we sometimes have to live with unpleasant realities," and how we deal with those realities can make for some really good reading on a rainy day. Give this book a shot because you will enjoy its upscale commentary on relationships - the unfairness of it all and the sick pleasure one might achieve from revenge and redemption. Once you leave the comfort of your home - the comfort of your loved one - anything is possible ...