Sharp Objects

Recently going to see Gone Girl at the cinema reminded me that I still had Sharp Objects languishing unread on our Kindle. It's the third Gillian Flynn novel I have read but apparently the first she wrote. The storyline here is definitely not for the fainthearted and at points I felt quite queasy reading it. The central theme of two girls in a small town in Missouri being murdered is obviously horrific, but having read several crime thrillers over the years, I have pretty much become immune to the emotional pull of murdered young fictional women and girls. It feels bizarre writing that but so many novels start with such a death that it is almost a prerequisite. Where Sharp Objects differs is that our viewpoint into the story comes via Camille, a journalist sent back to cover the story unfolding in her hometown. Camille not only has self harmed and in plenty of detail, but leads us into the bosom of her cold, dysfunctional family as she tries to come to terms with her personal past and the death of her younger sister. The relationships within her home and trailing our across the town are cleverly included in the story, explaining why she is as she is. I don't think Sharp Objects is as good a story as Gone Girl and it doesn't have the former's intensity, but I appreciate that they both have unusual central female characters who are damaged and bizarre, yet memorable and definitely never stereotypical.

Oh, this was not my favorite, I’m afraid. Sharp Objects is skillfully written but the story is much darker than I’d normally go for (I read it for a book club), and the heroine just struggled throughout - I never felt happy for her and I had trouble relating to her, so, in the end, it felt like witnessing the life of someone I cared for but couldn’t connect with just unravel, in truly awful ways, while I could do nothing but watch. I didn’t enjoy it. Like the many descriptions of vomiting in the story, reading it felt like tasting bile for hours.

I didn’t like any of the characters (except her editor back in Chicago). The small town’s inhabitants are pretty uniformly characterized as uneducated, troubled, and driven to alcoholism, addiction, and escapism. I found this whole side of the book to be fairly insulting to small towns. Every character was a negative stereotype of unsophisticated, small-minded, gossipy people. It made it hard to care when you finally find out who did it.

Gillian Flynn's debut novel is set in a small Midwest town, and one again convinced me that American small towns must be full of dark secrets and horrors. The protagonist is Camille, a thirty something reporter from Chicago who gets sent back to her home town in Missouri for a story. Someone is killing little girls. Returning brings back memories of Camille's childhood and the loss of her young sister Marian. And then there's the dysfunctional relationship to her mother and the strangely precocious 13-year old half sister.

The plot twists weren't that hard to predict. What I enjoyed about the book was how uncomfortable it made me. There are horrors not far beneath the surface. There are no heroes, just many broken characters.