{"id":5967,"date":"2016-10-03T13:25:41","date_gmt":"2016-10-03T13:25:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?p=5967"},"modified":"2016-10-03T13:52:18","modified_gmt":"2016-10-03T13:52:18","slug":"you-will-know-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?p=5967","title":{"rendered":"You Will Know Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"You<\/a>Megan Abbott,\u00a0You Will Know\u00a0Me<\/em>\u00a0(Little, Brown & Company, July 2016)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Review by Kate Horsley<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Megan Abbott says that when she was reading the great hard-boiled writers of the \u201830s and \u201840s she became\u00a0\u201cintoxicated with the way the books appear very simple, but are not simple at all.\u201d (New Statesman<\/em><\/a>) Her first few novels \u2013\u00a0Queenpin<\/em>\u00a0in particular \u2013 have notable affinities with this earlier tradition. In her more recent novels, from\u00a0The End of Everything<\/em>\u00a0(2011) on, she has turned to more contemporary subject matter. But she has at the same time moved ever closer to that intoxicating sense of apparent simplicity combined with depth of meaning and the treatment of serious themes \u2013 most of all in her stunning 2016 novel,\u00a0You Will Know Me<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

In these last four books, Abbott\u2019s narratives recurrently probe the psychic wounds of the post-1980 American suburbs \u2013 the hidden desires and fierce ambitions, the bouts of hysteria and the heedless self-absorption, the competition-cursed relationships. Each novel gives readers a gripping combination of mystery and suspense, but with so many layers of culpability and denial that every step towards resolution leads us to see the whole idea of \u2018resolving things\u2019 as delusory.<\/p>\n

You Will Know Me<\/em>\u00a0centers on\u00a0a young gymnast, Devon, who is precociously aware that any slip could change her entire life. If this is true of a slight slip at the end of a spectacular vault, how much more true of slips in the endlessly tricky business of relating to other people, of loving and hating them without destroying the dream of flawless success: \u201cTo imagine a darkness at the center of that bright-lit, summer-skinned, effortless girl was very hard.\u201d\u00a0A different kind of dream \u2013 a lean-hipped, impossibly beautiful young man \u2013 threatens to unbalance the perfect equilibrium. When he is killed in a hit and run accident, there is more than one suspect, and Abbott\u2019s satisfying narrative twists keep us on the edge of our seats until the novel\u2019s end. She ultimately gives her readers a clear, uncontestable answer to the question, Who was driving the car? But almost every main character is caught in the tangled skein of carefully concealed guilt. Even the most innocent has lied, and there is little prospect of moral and emotional closure. As the novel ends, choices \u2013 probably not very good ones \u2013 are still being made.<\/p>\n

Abbott has created in Devon a moving portrait of a girl so shaped for her role as a champion gymnast that her life has almost no give in it. She has trained so uncompromisingly that her physical presence is imaged in terms of air-to-air missiles, ships\u2019 masts, oak beams; she is as stony-faced as the virginal huntress Artemis. For her family, she is an extraordinary extension of their collective will, their love and desire concentrated in her tiny form: \u201cher body, their body, one body \u2013 and all the exceptional talent contained within it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Devon is not in the habit of divulging the thoughts and feelings under this toughened exterior (\u201c\u2019You never want to hear what it\u2019s like being me,\u2019 she whispered\u2026\u201d). But then, in Abbott\u2019s suburbia, she is scarcely the only character who keeps things to themselves. Others chatter relentlessly \u2013 about looks, clothes, gymnastics, carpooling \u2013 but seldom with the aim of communicating either their real thoughts or their knowledge of the truth. And this, it seems, is just as well, because it is deception that binds together both community and family, that gives them strength: \u201cThat\u2019s what families were, weren\u2019t they? The strong ones, the ones that last. Not supporters or enablers so much as collaborators, accomplices, co-conspirators.\u201d\u00a0You Will Know Me<\/em>\u00a0is wonderfully disturbing and compelling \u2013 a remarkable novel, highly recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Megan Abbott,\u00a0You Will Know\u00a0Me\u00a0(Little, Brown & Company, July 2016) Review by Kate Horsley Megan Abbott says that when she was<\/p>\n

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