You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz

From the likes of A.S.A. Harrison’s The Silent Wife, S. J. Watson’s Before I Go To Sleep and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, through Emma Chapman’s How to Be a Good Wife, to Lucie Whitehouse’s Before We Met, chick noir/marriage thrillers/domestic noir – whatever you want to call them – are having a moment. For all their appeal, however, there’s something decidedly formulaic about most of them, soothingly so for the most part as we read them precisely because they’re predictably page-turning mysteries, but with You Should Have Known, Jean Hanff Korelitz has grasped the genre firmly with both hands, but at the same time made it uniquely her own.

Grace Reinhart Sachs is a respected New York therapist with an established practice in the city. Based on years of work with both couples and individuals, she’s about to “snag the Zeitgeist” with You Should Have Known: Why Women Fail to Hear What the Men in Their Lives are Telling Them, a self-help book that tells women to trust their intuition when it comes to the men in their lives. Grace writes from the vantage point afforded by twenty years of happy partnership with her husband Jonathan, a self-sacrificing pediatric oncologist – “His life, and her life, was a life of service to terribly unhappy people, carefully balanced by the precious, personal joy of family love and the modest enjoyment of comforts” – their family completed by their twelve-year-old son, Henry.

What begins as a novel of sharp social commentary – the “topography of New York private schools”, parent-run fundraising committees, Jackson Pollock-decorated Fifth Avenue apartments, the etiquette of Manhattan children’s birthday parties and violin lessons, the adopted Chinese child prodigy preparing for her bat mitzvah – slowly, and thus incredibly convincingly, descends into the realms of nightmare. Rearden, Henry’s prestigious school (also Grace’s alma mater) is rocked by the murder of the mother of one of its fourth graders. Grace, like all the other parents, is saddened and shocked by the news, but suddenly and without warning, Jonathan has disappeared and she finds herself at the centre of the scandal; it's as if someone has “custom written a horror story for [her] life”.

The irony of course is that for all her insight into other people’s marriages, Grace remained oblivious to the flaws in her own, and this is where the novel’s strength lies. It rejects the more obviously thrillerish elements of the genre and focuses instead on the simple story of a woman whose world collapses around her but who has to pick herself up and build it from scratch again. This is significantly superior domestic noir.