Devon Knox is an
immensely promising young gymnast, despite having lost two toes in an
accident with a lawn mower when she was just three. She's worked
obsessively hard, and her parents, Eric and Katie, have had to work
just as hard, and make serious sacrifices, devoting themselves to her
career. But when the handsome young assistant coach at her gym is
killed in a hit and run, the finely tuned cocoon around her begins to
come apart, and the family face
difficult choices as blame and suspicion permeate their
tightly-wrapped world fraught with competition, pressure, and
jealousy.
All parents know
that feeling that 'one morning you wake up and there is this alien in
your house', but even as she says it Megan Abbott is reinforcing the
darkness behind it with the story of cave fish who, when seeing their
parents for the first time, still cannot be seen by them. Around this
tension flows the classic noirish theme of the man with the one-train
mind, but half-track brain; the innocents and the temptresses,
tempered by the family and 'the smell of chloraseptic and panic'.
One of the beauties
of Abbott's writing is the way she can transform the most mundane
narrative into a dream-like state, where the characters are fighting as much
with fate as with each other. This would come as no surprise to
readers of her first five novels, with titles like Die A Little and
Bury Me Deep, which drew on classic film noir themes and settings, in
a way which heralded her as an original and unique voice in crime
writing. You Will Know Me is her ninth novel; the last four have been
set in a suburban world that is indeed more mundane, but every bit as
threatening as the world of those earlier books.
I was surprised the
marketing people didn't try to retitle this one something like The
Girl On The Balance Beam, in an attempt to lure in that 'Girl
whatever' audience. But You Will Know Me is a title which points the
way to what this story is at heart, a true noir thriller. At a time
when everything from Danish political dramas to cozy kitchen
mysteries has the label 'noir' slapped on it, rendering the term
virtually meaningless, what Abbott has done is to drawn out the
essence of noir from these modern settings, and subtly transmuted the
basics of noir to serve her purposes. There's a touch of Thomas H
Cook in this, a bigger touch of Dorothy Hughes, but each of Abbott's
novels has had its own approach to this darkness. Her dilemma is how
to make our world and its optimism jibe with the futility that lurks
at the heart of the world of noir.
She does it with the
help of the kind of classical allusions that Devon's injury recalls,
as much Nathaniel Hawthorne as James M Cain, as well as the
contemporary (Amanda Knox?). The dreamy images of seeing, of illness,
of fever, that run through the tale draw you into its world. They
immerse you in its uncertainty. Not in the mystery puzzle sense, but
in the sense of how does life continue? how is life measured? how do
children grow up and parents help and hinder them? It brings the
dilemmas of real noir down to an everyday level, which, if you study
it, is the essence of noir, the everyday turned upside down. This
tale of everyday obsession may well be Megan Abbott's finest piece of
writing to date, which means it is exceptional.
You Will Know Me by
Megan Abbott
Picador, £14.99,
ISBN 9781447226352
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