The Silent Patient
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I’m in my psychological thriller era! Except now I’ll be taking a break because I thrilled too close to the sun.
The beginning of The Silent Patient hooked me. Without spoiling anything (this is all back of the book fodder), we’ve got a famous artist, Alicia, who kills her husband and goes completely silent. We don’t know why she did it or even if she did it. Lots of meat on the bone here.
The psychotherapist who treats her is also initially interesting. He’s got his own crap in his personal life but he’s drawn to Alicia and wants to help her. That was endearing for maybe 50 pages; then he started to annoy me. I picture him as someone who I would not want to be stuck with at a party, so being stuck with him as a narrator became a bit of a slog. By the end, he wasn’t even really a psychotherapist but a full blown detective trying to crack the case. As such, the plot became too chaotic and increasingly unrealistic.
I also grew annoyed with the attempt at misdirection. He built up peripheral characters but then they didn’t serve much actual purpose aside from distraction. I think that showed a lack of skill on the author’s part. I’m now seeing The Housemaid in a slightly different light, because at least McFadden made her seemingly throwaway details tidy and useful. For example, she included a small detail about a peanut allergy that ended up serving as a revealing tidbit. Instead, in The Silent Patient, we learn something like a character being super cruel and morbidly obese and it ends up serving no purpose whatsoever. I don’t even remember the chick’s name. So, I stopped trusting that the author was leading me down a pertinent path. As a whole, I didn’t feel connected to any of the characters– not even the main ones.
This all sounds negative (because it is lol) but I actually really liked the twist and was impressed by the execution. I was genuinely shocked! I don’t think that’s entirely good, though. I was shocked partially because I didn’t really have a grasp on the characters in the first place, and I just straight up don’t like that kind of writing. I like being surprised but I don’t like being fooled. The Silent Patient gets 3 out of 5 flames. For the record, I grade thrillers on a slightly different scale than other fiction, i.e. I’m less inclined to give a 1 or 2. Was I drawn in? Did I read it quickly? Was I surprised? Then yeah, I’ll give it a 3. If the writing is sharper and more clever, like Dark Places, it gets that bump to 4. If It’s incredibly inventive, like Room, it gets that extra bump to 5. But The Silent Patient is a solid 3- it takes like two days to read and you’ll be reasonably satisfied with the twist.
