Book Review: Sharp Objects
February 10th, 2008 Posted in books | 2 Comments »Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects starts out in run-of-the-mill detective novel style: Camille, a hardened reporter based in Chicago, goes to Wind Gap, a small town in Missouri, to write a piece on the murders of two local girls. The twist is, Wind Gap is Camille’s hometown and she had very strong reasons for leaving. The first 150 pages make a compelling read, but the characters and situations are too familiar to be particularly interesting: there’s the cute cop from Kansas City who Camille begins a flirtation with; the shallow, baby-obsessed housewives who judge Camille for being over 30 and unmarried; the distant mother and tear-away half-sister who Camille struggles to connect with. Considering Flynn herself grew up in small-town Missouri, the novel’s setting is surprisingly generic.
However, the novel’s denouement is well worth wading through the less-than-stellar first half. Flynn may have set up a formulaic murder mystery, but what she delivers is something altogether darker. To reveal the secrets at the heart of Sharp Objects would be to spoil the novel, but the suffice to say, its conclusion is genuinely frightening (without resorting to horror-movie spectacle). It’s also unflinching: in comparison with the watered-down feminism of most novels, I found it refreshing to read a book about women that did not pull any punches. Flynn’s novel is about female psyche rotted to the core. More than a hundred years on, Flynn establishes that the figure of Angel In the House still remains in much of the Western world: she’s alive and unwell. As Camille comments, women become sick in a very different way to men; they are consumed by sickness and they glory in it.
Recommended.