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3.03 AVERAGE
3.03 AVERAGE
I quite liked this one. It was like a study of marriage between two people who have outgrown each other, aren't really likable people, and who are just comfortable with leaving things just the way they are. Todd is a cheater, abusive, manipulative, and just an all around dirt bag. He justifies his behavior constantly. Jodi is passive aggressive, kind of mediocre in her doings, and in denial about everything. But she's content with her life. So when Todd finally leaves because he impregnated his best friend's daughter, everything gets turned upside down (for the both of them!) when that content life they both lead has to change.
This is *not* a psychological thriller that every one claims it is. Don't compare it to Gone Girl. The only similarities are that the people are messed up. I like books like Gone Girl, so it was disappointing that this wasn't what was advertised. However, like I said, I enjoyed it for what it is.
This is *not* a psychological thriller that every one claims it is. Don't compare it to Gone Girl. The only similarities are that the people are messed up. I like books like Gone Girl, so it was disappointing that this wasn't what was advertised. However, like I said, I enjoyed it for what it is.
A train wreck of a relationship is witnessed by alternating points of view of the husband and wife...eerie and captivating.
Just mediocre writing, felt like it dragged in several areas.
I don't quite know why I keep reading these "Gillian Flynn" genre books about women who have almost zero likable qualities about them...and this one was no exception. Although I liked the different perspectives and there were certain passages that rang true, I was mostly frustrated by the two main characters. They were both very selfish in their own ways and I didn't feel invested with either one of them.
This book is touted as this year's Gone Girl. It was compelling but the end was twisted and I am still not sure how I feel about it. Hmmmmm........
'The Silent Wife' is a literary masterpiece featuring the inner unwinding of several characters. These psychological disclosures which slowly become obvious to the reader through alternating chapters of 'HER' and 'HIM', are invisible to the characters. They are simply living their life, either being moved like chess pieces by events or are making decisions they believe are reasonable. Sometimes they can't justify anything they are doing, and make their moves, or not, without understanding. I thought it reflected real life very accurately.
A disintegrating relationship of 20 years between two people, 45-year-old Jodi Brett and 46-year-old Todd Gilbert, power the story forward. Everyone they know assumes they are married, but Jodi refused his proposal many years ago. At the current time of the story, they are an upper middle-class couple living in a beautiful apartment with a gorgeous view of an Illinois lake. Todd builds buildings, rents them out or sells them, then he moves on to the next construction project. He doesn't like to spend much time with the finished structure. Joni is a psychiatrist, but not full-time. She usually fills her appointment book with two patients a day and has the rest of the day to herself. Everything, including credit cards, are in Todd's name. He willingly takes care of all of Jodi's expenses while she takes care of the apartment and a lovable dog she has named Freud, as a joke against misogyny. They have no children, although Todd feels an occasional pang over that.
For Jodi, she finds her life a pleasant cocoon of quiet and peace. She does not accept patients unless they are mildly unhappy with small problems. She wants everything regular, habitual and placid. She doesn't even dream, as far as she knows. Todd is happy with her, despite his more vivid and gregarious nature. He basically likes the beige and off-white design of their lives in the condo. But Todd is feeling more restless of late. He has filled the times of his dissatisfaction through the years with short affairs, and he's thinking its time for another. He doesn't believe she knows, but actually, he's aware she wouldn't mind as long as he never brings it up. He's right. She accepts everything he does, ironing his shirts, cooking his meals, as long as he maintains their comforts.
He cannot meet a woman without fantasizing about having sex with her. Despite his active and friendly approach to life, he suffers from depression, but new women restore his vitality. The truth is he's feeling a little middle-aged. But when he meets, Natasha Kovacs, his oldest friend's daughter, everything is shiny again. He's more than a little scared to tell Dean, who is his age, about the relationship with Dean's daughter, though.
Natasha is young and wants to get married and have kids. She will soon have a BA degree in art history, but she is not planning for a career. While Todd admires Jodi's brainy intellectualism and her beauty, he thinks he is falling in love with the immature fire of Natasha. He is content to leave things as they are, but Natasha soon makes it clear this is not her plan. After bringing up suggestions that they get married, that he leave Jodi, that they move in together, countless times when they are together, she announces one day she is pregnant, and she is no longer suggesting they marry. From this point on, she is all demands.
Todd concedes and agrees. He keeps his uncertainty hidden, and the idea grows on him. However, Natasha is taking charge and she is prepared to call Jodi herself, forcing Todd to move from lip-service to getting a lawyer.
So the unraveling begins.
Natasha is similar to many more young real women than there should be in the world. I frequently find Natasha types in every true crime book written by Ann Rule. They are so desperate to be in love and to get married. Frankly, I don't get it. I always wanted a job. I find Jodi much more palatable to my liking than Natasha, although I thought Jodi incredibly stupid in relying completely on Todd's affection for continuing support of her despite his affairs and horribly unconscious about her willful blindness to her own psychological problems leading to her feeling contented with this blatantly obvious false commitment of love.
Todd is a law-abiding if dysfunctional man seeking his mother in every woman, and he encourages them to rely on him because he assures them he'll take care of them, creating a psychological space and a hopeful chance at a do-over to fix the mother he couldn't save decades ago when he was a child in an abusive home. But even before Natasha and Todd began to plan their wedding, I didn't think Todd was as delusional as Jodi. The facade he built in his mind for Natasha, that of the Holy Mother, no matter how vivacious and forceful she actually was, which was the foundation of his infatuation, was fading fast near the end of the book. She was morphing more and more into the Mother of the Apron Strings, who loves and controls her little boy utterly, and he was resenting it.
If Todd and Natalie had married, I think it would have been a terrible marriage. Todd would have had lots of affairs, and Natalie would have become a paranoid screaming shrew. I think Todd would have discovered what happens to vivacious firecracker personalities who become disappointed in their spouses.
Jodi couldn't ignore the legal moves Todd was initiating against her. If she resorted to her usual self-protection move of using the pretense nothing was affecting her because nothing was really happening, she'd soon be on the street with no resources to survive. He was literally kicking her out into the street with nothing to show for their 20 years together. She had learned to anesthetize herself emotionally by living only in the moment, but she wasn't stupid, only blind. The shock of seeing herself for the first time in her life and realizing how terrible Todd was betraying her sends her over the edge.
She had recently had a thunderbolt of a memory about her own childhood strike her after a series of psychiatric analyses appointments for her job as a psychiatrist. She had decided to experience what her patients did in therapy, as well as follow recommended procedures commonly accepted amongst her peers - to be therapeutically analyzed even if she felt fine.
The thunderbolt involved her brothers. Gerard, her therapist, led her to try to remember any dream, since she could remember almost none. Instead, she realizes her idyllic memories about Darrell, five years older, and Ryan, her younger brother, were not correct. She had been suppressing the memory that Darrell had raped her for several years from the age of six. Ryan, now an adult, acted as if he were rebelling against something when he got older, running away from the family to India and other counterculture adventures after a childhood as a wild teen. She realizes Darrell must have begun raping Ryan after he stopped raping her.
Deep inside her unconscious, Todd was a representation of Ryan. She had created a familiar relationship with Todd that she had learned how to be with Ryan, which calmed her and made her feel good when she was a child. She simply transferred the familiar comfort of taking care of Ryan when he was a baby to Todd. As she played the role of a good housewife - cooking, cleaning, ironing and advising - her life with Todd was in reality an ancient Gif rerun, comforting herself at the same time while boxing up her unconscious memory of rape by the surface peace she maintained. Any storms on top would have churned up the bottom, which is what happened. She was able to hold off the emotional storm with her placid non-marriage, until the destruction of her self-numbing through Todd's desertion because of Natasha.
For some readers, I'm afraid all they may figure out is that this is a slow book of too much psychological self-talk, a nearsighted examination of a marriage gone bad, allowing us to see vaguely what is happening to the characters, without much excitement. But the well-written examination of realistic people cracking open the truths of their relationships also brings on an alchemical magic of illumination. It takes a slow careful reading to learn the mysteries that are truly being being exposed. Although this is a mystery thriller of sorts, it's not typical one. It's more of a stroll in a park instead of a race, with a low temperature finish.
While I enjoyed the book very much, I was horrified to see that many readers were given an understanding that this book was another 'Gone Girl' by Gillian Flynn. It is NOT. I think the publishers completely misled readers in advertising it as such. 'Gone Girl' was about a psychopath and designed as a true Hitchcock-type thriller with offbeat characters. This book, however, was a realistic psychological literary mystery, without any madness in the characters. These characters are to be found in any neighborhood and somewhere in every family in America. People similar to Jodi, Todd and Natasha are as commonly found in human communities as dirt. When Jodi makes a very bad decision about what to do about Todd, it is a desperate one of temporary overwhelming rage mixed up with her newly emerged emotions about Darrell, her brother.
I loved this book. I thought the writing was brilliant.
A disintegrating relationship of 20 years between two people, 45-year-old Jodi Brett and 46-year-old Todd Gilbert, power the story forward. Everyone they know assumes they are married, but Jodi refused his proposal many years ago. At the current time of the story, they are an upper middle-class couple living in a beautiful apartment with a gorgeous view of an Illinois lake. Todd builds buildings, rents them out or sells them, then he moves on to the next construction project. He doesn't like to spend much time with the finished structure. Joni is a psychiatrist, but not full-time. She usually fills her appointment book with two patients a day and has the rest of the day to herself. Everything, including credit cards, are in Todd's name. He willingly takes care of all of Jodi's expenses while she takes care of the apartment and a lovable dog she has named Freud, as a joke against misogyny. They have no children, although Todd feels an occasional pang over that.
For Jodi, she finds her life a pleasant cocoon of quiet and peace. She does not accept patients unless they are mildly unhappy with small problems. She wants everything regular, habitual and placid. She doesn't even dream, as far as she knows. Todd is happy with her, despite his more vivid and gregarious nature. He basically likes the beige and off-white design of their lives in the condo. But Todd is feeling more restless of late. He has filled the times of his dissatisfaction through the years with short affairs, and he's thinking its time for another. He doesn't believe she knows, but actually, he's aware she wouldn't mind as long as he never brings it up. He's right. She accepts everything he does, ironing his shirts, cooking his meals, as long as he maintains their comforts.
He cannot meet a woman without fantasizing about having sex with her. Despite his active and friendly approach to life, he suffers from depression, but new women restore his vitality. The truth is he's feeling a little middle-aged. But when he meets, Natasha Kovacs, his oldest friend's daughter, everything is shiny again. He's more than a little scared to tell Dean, who is his age, about the relationship with Dean's daughter, though.
Natasha is young and wants to get married and have kids. She will soon have a BA degree in art history, but she is not planning for a career. While Todd admires Jodi's brainy intellectualism and her beauty, he thinks he is falling in love with the immature fire of Natasha. He is content to leave things as they are, but Natasha soon makes it clear this is not her plan. After bringing up suggestions that they get married, that he leave Jodi, that they move in together, countless times when they are together, she announces one day she is pregnant, and she is no longer suggesting they marry. From this point on, she is all demands.
Todd concedes and agrees. He keeps his uncertainty hidden, and the idea grows on him. However, Natasha is taking charge and she is prepared to call Jodi herself, forcing Todd to move from lip-service to getting a lawyer.
So the unraveling begins.
Natasha is similar to many more young real women than there should be in the world. I frequently find Natasha types in every true crime book written by Ann Rule. They are so desperate to be in love and to get married. Frankly, I don't get it. I always wanted a job. I find Jodi much more palatable to my liking than Natasha, although I thought Jodi incredibly stupid in relying completely on Todd's affection for continuing support of her despite his affairs and horribly unconscious about her willful blindness to her own psychological problems leading to her feeling contented with this blatantly obvious false commitment of love.
Spoiler
Todd is a law-abiding if dysfunctional man seeking his mother in every woman, and he encourages them to rely on him because he assures them he'll take care of them, creating a psychological space and a hopeful chance at a do-over to fix the mother he couldn't save decades ago when he was a child in an abusive home. But even before Natasha and Todd began to plan their wedding, I didn't think Todd was as delusional as Jodi. The facade he built in his mind for Natasha, that of the Holy Mother, no matter how vivacious and forceful she actually was, which was the foundation of his infatuation, was fading fast near the end of the book. She was morphing more and more into the Mother of the Apron Strings, who loves and controls her little boy utterly, and he was resenting it.
If Todd and Natalie had married, I think it would have been a terrible marriage. Todd would have had lots of affairs, and Natalie would have become a paranoid screaming shrew. I think Todd would have discovered what happens to vivacious firecracker personalities who become disappointed in their spouses.
Jodi couldn't ignore the legal moves Todd was initiating against her. If she resorted to her usual self-protection move of using the pretense nothing was affecting her because nothing was really happening, she'd soon be on the street with no resources to survive. He was literally kicking her out into the street with nothing to show for their 20 years together. She had learned to anesthetize herself emotionally by living only in the moment, but she wasn't stupid, only blind. The shock of seeing herself for the first time in her life and realizing how terrible Todd was betraying her sends her over the edge.
She had recently had a thunderbolt of a memory about her own childhood strike her after a series of psychiatric analyses appointments for her job as a psychiatrist. She had decided to experience what her patients did in therapy, as well as follow recommended procedures commonly accepted amongst her peers - to be therapeutically analyzed even if she felt fine.
The thunderbolt involved her brothers. Gerard, her therapist, led her to try to remember any dream, since she could remember almost none. Instead, she realizes her idyllic memories about Darrell, five years older, and Ryan, her younger brother, were not correct. She had been suppressing the memory that Darrell had raped her for several years from the age of six. Ryan, now an adult, acted as if he were rebelling against something when he got older, running away from the family to India and other counterculture adventures after a childhood as a wild teen. She realizes Darrell must have begun raping Ryan after he stopped raping her.
Deep inside her unconscious, Todd was a representation of Ryan. She had created a familiar relationship with Todd that she had learned how to be with Ryan, which calmed her and made her feel good when she was a child. She simply transferred the familiar comfort of taking care of Ryan when he was a baby to Todd. As she played the role of a good housewife - cooking, cleaning, ironing and advising - her life with Todd was in reality an ancient Gif rerun, comforting herself at the same time while boxing up her unconscious memory of rape by the surface peace she maintained. Any storms on top would have churned up the bottom, which is what happened. She was able to hold off the emotional storm with her placid non-marriage, until the destruction of her self-numbing through Todd's desertion because of Natasha.
For some readers, I'm afraid all they may figure out is that this is a slow book of too much psychological self-talk, a nearsighted examination of a marriage gone bad, allowing us to see vaguely what is happening to the characters, without much excitement. But the well-written examination of realistic people cracking open the truths of their relationships also brings on an alchemical magic of illumination. It takes a slow careful reading to learn the mysteries that are truly being being exposed. Although this is a mystery thriller of sorts, it's not typical one. It's more of a stroll in a park instead of a race, with a low temperature finish.
While I enjoyed the book very much, I was horrified to see that many readers were given an understanding that this book was another 'Gone Girl' by Gillian Flynn. It is NOT. I think the publishers completely misled readers in advertising it as such. 'Gone Girl' was about a psychopath and designed as a true Hitchcock-type thriller with offbeat characters. This book, however, was a realistic psychological literary mystery, without any madness in the characters. These characters are to be found in any neighborhood and somewhere in every family in America. People similar to Jodi, Todd and Natasha are as commonly found in human communities as dirt. When Jodi makes a very bad decision about what to do about Todd, it is a desperate one of temporary overwhelming rage mixed up with her newly emerged emotions about Darrell, her brother.
I loved this book. I thought the writing was brilliant.
I am so disappointed with this book. It was recommended to me, which is the only reason I felt obliged to finish it, but I personally could never recommend this book to anyone. I’m not usually one to put spoilers in a review but I just have to explain why this book was so terrible.
The book is centred around Jodi and Todd, a married couple. Todd is a serial cheater. Jodi is a psychologist and lives in denial. Todd has an affair with his best friend’s daughter Natasha and gets her pregnant.
In the blurb, it basically says Jodi is going to kill Todd. Firstly, she doesn’t even kill him. She doesn’t even plan it. She just pays someone else to do it. It wasn’t until page 304/369 that he actually died. I expected the first part of the book to be a short introduction into the characters, Jodi’s motive, the murder, then the case. Nope. 304 pages of Todd having an affair, getting Natasha pregnant, moving out of his house with Jodi and into a house with Natasha, planning a wedding, trying to evict Jodi, potentially about to start another affair then finally dying. Even the death was boring. Jodi’s friend is all “hey we should kill him, give me some money and I’ll sort it out, k?”. So she gives her friend the money then some guys pull up in a car next to Todd and shoot him. His whole murder takes less than a page and these are physically small pages.
Then starts the murder case. I finally thought “okay, here we go” when the detectives start asking Jodi lots of questions. But then they come back and say “jk, we don’t think it was you anymore, we arrested Natasha’s dad, the end”. Like, what? There’s barely any evidence it was him. Jodi can’t get hold of her friend, so she thinks her friend has taken the money and run. Does she try to find out? Nope. Does she do a Jean Valjean from Les Misérables and confess when she hears someone else has been arrested? Nope. Does this damn woman do anything at all? NO SHE DOES NOT.
Throughout the book, there are an abundance of side storylines. Todd has a HIV scare, which is a major deal in the book. After he dies, it turns out he doesn’t have it! What was the point of this storyline? Another one is Jodi’s conversation with her psychology mentor, in which she talks about her family. It’s such a dull conversation that I didn’t even feel there was going to be a storyline around it. But surprise! Four pages from the end of the book, she alludes to the fact her older brother molested her. Again, why put that in? It seems like a last ditch attempt to add some shock to this boring book.
Speaking of the ending... good lord. The last page. The book just... ends. It feels like it cuts off in the middle of a paragraph and I was left confused.
The front of the book says it’s going to be made into a movie and honestly I cannot see that happening. This is a book I will never reread in my life. It’s not a long book, it’s broken into lots of short chapters and I could only bear to read a few pages at a time because it was so dull. I felt disappointed every time I picked the book up because I didn’t want to read it but also I wanted to get rid of it off my shelf and out of my house.
Spoiler
The book is centred around Jodi and Todd, a married couple. Todd is a serial cheater. Jodi is a psychologist and lives in denial. Todd has an affair with his best friend’s daughter Natasha and gets her pregnant.
In the blurb, it basically says Jodi is going to kill Todd. Firstly, she doesn’t even kill him. She doesn’t even plan it. She just pays someone else to do it. It wasn’t until page 304/369 that he actually died. I expected the first part of the book to be a short introduction into the characters, Jodi’s motive, the murder, then the case. Nope. 304 pages of Todd having an affair, getting Natasha pregnant, moving out of his house with Jodi and into a house with Natasha, planning a wedding, trying to evict Jodi, potentially about to start another affair then finally dying. Even the death was boring. Jodi’s friend is all “hey we should kill him, give me some money and I’ll sort it out, k?”. So she gives her friend the money then some guys pull up in a car next to Todd and shoot him. His whole murder takes less than a page and these are physically small pages.
Then starts the murder case. I finally thought “okay, here we go” when the detectives start asking Jodi lots of questions. But then they come back and say “jk, we don’t think it was you anymore, we arrested Natasha’s dad, the end”. Like, what? There’s barely any evidence it was him. Jodi can’t get hold of her friend, so she thinks her friend has taken the money and run. Does she try to find out? Nope. Does she do a Jean Valjean from Les Misérables and confess when she hears someone else has been arrested? Nope. Does this damn woman do anything at all? NO SHE DOES NOT.
Throughout the book, there are an abundance of side storylines. Todd has a HIV scare, which is a major deal in the book. After he dies, it turns out he doesn’t have it! What was the point of this storyline? Another one is Jodi’s conversation with her psychology mentor, in which she talks about her family. It’s such a dull conversation that I didn’t even feel there was going to be a storyline around it. But surprise! Four pages from the end of the book, she alludes to the fact her older brother molested her. Again, why put that in? It seems like a last ditch attempt to add some shock to this boring book.
Speaking of the ending... good lord. The last page. The book just... ends. It feels like it cuts off in the middle of a paragraph and I was left confused.
The front of the book says it’s going to be made into a movie and honestly I cannot see that happening. This is a book I will never reread in my life. It’s not a long book, it’s broken into lots of short chapters and I could only bear to read a few pages at a time because it was so dull. I felt disappointed every time I picked the book up because I didn’t want to read it but also I wanted to get rid of it off my shelf and out of my house.