Thriller set on Bainbridge Island (WASHINGTON STATE)

2nd April 2021

You Love Me by Caroline Kepnes, thriller set on Bainbridge Island (Washington State).

This is no. 3 in the Joe Goldberg series and he has left New York City and Los Angeles behind (together with his “RIP” paramours and accidental victims) and has headed for pastures new on Bainbridge Island – which is but a ferry ride from Seattle. This time he wants a proper, old fashioned relationship and a family, and he soon homes in on librarian Mary Kay DiMarco.

I have come to this novel after watching the “You” series on Netflix, where Penn Badgley is wonderfully cast as Joe. I have accompanied him on his bloody journey, as he mercilessly searches for love and the perfect woman, whom he can put on a pedestal. But like all those elevated to dizzying heights, the women inevitably plummet from the pedestal to the ground and Joe hasn’t quite sussed out that his liaisons are doomed to failure; he is a repeat offender, as it were. He is intelligent in many ways, but emotionally lacking and runs his life based on what he ‘thinks’ will work with others. OK, he has psychopathic tendencies.

The transition from the Netflix visual – which is full of colour and vibrancy – to the written word, is quite a leap.In the novel, the prose is like a stream of consciousness – written in ‘you’ form (and this is the second book in a row where second person narrative is used; for me the jury is still out as to how well it works). This is presumably a device to get the reader looking over the shoulder of the character. And so we peer in on Joe’s murky world of stalker behaviour. In his basement he has already installed a Whisper Room at the ready, a sound isolation centre, where of course he can pen someone up, which he has already done several times in his previous life. Mary Kay’s friend is soon incarcerated; he attempts interchanges with her and of course snaffles her phone so he can have his evil and manipulative way to help build his convincing story and lasso Mary Kay through impersonation.

The true path of stalking does not, of course, run smoothly but Joe is practised at luring his prey into his gameplay and soon MK is falling for him. There are moments of high drama when she hasn’t acquiesced to his narrative, but once ensnared, he feels happy in the moment. The dislocation between Joe’s actual thoughts and what comes out of his mouth is interesting, he certainly has an acute eye for meanness, and he projects onto others his own devious thought processes and devilish motives (under the cover of being good and caring). He fervently believes he is doing the right thing. The other people in his narrative are the baddies and thus his goodness is preserved.

Just in case anyone thought I was exaggerating

The TV series has been slick. This book is the first (of the series) that I have actually read, and it was valuable to have a little background, otherwise the story may have felt quite disjointed at times; it therefore probably shouldn’t be read as a standalone. It bowls along quite nicely. Joe is a bookish fellow, so there is a good mention of literature; but there is an utter overkill in the use of the F word, and I actually don’t have an issue with swearing, but this was crazy. The trouble is that once I spotted this frequent use (randomly I found 4 words on a single page), it started to grate, I couldn’t help scouring the pages, like a game, to spot how many expletives there were on a single page. Game playing in the narrative mirrored in the process of reading, perhaps? Joe, you see, is well read and wouldn’t need to resort to swearing to supplement his vocabulary, so it just felt gratuitous and annoying. The author too has a vast range of vocabulary so the same goes for her.

Maybe this is an American language thing but there were several references that I just didn’t get. I did, however, snort out loud and laugh when I saw this particular description of lovemaking: “You pinch my ears and I moved my mouth along your body, down, down, down, where I pull a rabbit out of your hat, your Murakami, your soul“. A contender, perhaps, for The Bad Sex in Fiction Award (run by the Literary Review).

I really enjoyed the first series of “You” on TV, the second was so-so and now reading this book (the equivalent of no. 3) I feel I have spent more than enough time in Joe’s stalking world (Joe has quite a two dimensional modus operandi): once again there is the cage in the basement, the inadvertently captured people that he has to deal with and there is the old adage of “shitty childhood” = personality-disorder-without-any-real-background detail (his mother didn’t read to him, we know that much). Regrettably I think this is not one for me and I prefer the TV series over the book.

Tina for the TripFiction Team

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