The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

I've just finished The Girl on the Train and I'm a little bit stunned.  I really enjoyed the beginning of the book.  Rachel's thoughts are so cleverly arranged that you feel as though you're looking in at her through a crack in the door.  Slowly you realize how desperate she is and you feel increasing anxiety - her anxiety - that something bad, something very bad, has happened and that she is somehow involved.  Rachel's attempts to buck herself up reminded me so much of myself that I began to identify with her, and I found myself feeling anxious, guilty and shamed.

As I write this, I'm recovering from my shock and feeling that this is a classically and cleverly designed plot and novel.  Perhaps someone more widely read than myself will point out that the turning points of the plot would, if abstracted, be highly similar to several other hugely popular thrillers.  It's a great structure.  And it's hugely suspenseful, drawing you in from the very first and seeming to accelerate.

I have to say that what makes the book for me is the atmosphere of Rachel's character.  Rachel changes a lot throughout the course of the novel, although she remains a little lost.  (Perhaps the ending is wrapped up a little too quickly, a little too easily to be quite believable.)  Rachel's quite the liar - it'll make you cringe - but she's quite honest with herself.

9/27/15

As I look back on the book, I find myself thinking that is has a classic, Hitchcockian quality:  things seem normal, if bleak, and as the layers of the plot are revealed, you learn that things are really shockingly different from what you imagined.  Things that appeared to be normal are not normal.

I love the idea that the plot springs from an ordinary, everyday activity .. looking in the windows of homes from the train.  I think the very surprises of the plot, hugely entertaining as they are, leave me somehow unsatisfied.

I find myself thinking of The Secret Place by Tana French.  In French's novel, she captures the ephemera of human experience:  the feeling that you have about a person as they walk toward you or by you, those flitters of judgment and assessment that are perhaps unworthy and are quickly forgotten.  Like James, she captures the thoughts and communications and the underlying reality that are never spoken but which, when shared, are still part of the situation.  I've wondered if she invites comparison with James in this respect. I've also wondered if her work as an actor has influenced her sensitivity to perception.

 I think that psychological perception was very much part of what I admired in The Secret Place, and perhaps that's part of what I'm missing in Girl on the Train.  Girl on the Train is 336 pages and The Secret Place is 480 pages. Shorter is often better, and the readers in my book group would prefer shorter.  Many readers prefer plot over characterization, and I prefer characterization over plot.

Having said that, Girl on the Train is entirely successful, in my view, in achieving its aims.  If you like suspense, I'd highly recommend it.