You Should Have Known

This absolutely should not be renamed The Undoing, as the book and the show are very, very different.

I admit that I started reading this after watching the first episode of The Undoing and wanting to know more of how things would go.

I did read the book in just a few days, but I think that if I hadnt wanted to know how the show would go, I would have given up on the book. Now that Im a few more episodes into the show I can see that the plots are completely different.

That being said: this book spends way too much time on inconsequential details while completely ignoring gaping plot holes and introducing too many major ideas that are never fully developed.

How the main character can function without even the slightest curiosity into what her husband has been up to for most of the book is beyond me. How did she miss the huge red flags? Why does she have plenty of money yet not bother winterizing their cabin for months?! Ugh I could go on.

But the bottom line is the book is poorly written, the characters largely undeveloped, the plot is all over the place, and the ending was trite.

Im glad to see the show go in a very different direction. Will not be reading any of the authors other titles.

There was so much in this book that just didn’t matter. It should have been 100 pages long instead of over 400. At one point, she said, “Hi” to her stepmother on the phone and then packed in two or three paragraphs about his the parents didn’t like cell phones and technology before her stepmother responded, “How are you?” This, coupled with the fact that the main character is an intolerant, condescending snob makes this book hard to finish. It’s hard to root for a character who thinks she’s so above it all that she writes a book about how other women should have known their husbands weren’t marriage material.

I read a lot of reviews before I purchased this book on my Kindle, and knew I was either going to enjoy it a lot or hate it, and I’d say my reaction was mostly on the enjoyable side. I loved the premise – I think a lot of the things the main character states at the beginning of the novel about how (she feels) women in bad relationships should have known things would turn sour based on things they intuited about their partners when they were first dating is dead on – I can’t count the number of times a female friend or acquaintance has said something similar (or exactly the same!) to me following a bad break-up/divorce. It is patently obvious from the beginning that the main character is going to be hoisted on her own petard, so to speak, but the book was well-written enough that I was interested to see just how that was going to take place. I had no trouble believing that the man character was instantly ostracized by her “friends” after the mysterious murder of a fellow “mom” who turns out to have been involved with her husband – especially since she freely admits in the book that they aren’t really friends, but rather people she needs/likes to stay “in good” with because of her family circumstances. The depiction of her friends is a bit skewed – they almost all seem like shallow, gossipy vultures, and I did have some difficulty believing that no one, especially perhaps the head of her son’s school, spilled the beans about her husband’s illegitimate son after her husband disappeared and was clearly a suspect in the death of his mistress, but that omission is required to move things along. The reveal at the end about her husband’s family was expected, but I thought it was described well. The almost seamless acceptance of her son regarding his father’s actions and personality are far-fetched – I can’t imagine a child his age more or less shrugging and saying it’s all OK; I feel an adverse reaction would have suited the story better. The main character’s reaction to the truth is more believable – she feels like a fool, she (sort of) runs away to escape the publicity and scrutiny and begins to come to terms with the fact that “she should have known” about her husband. I did like the fact that her book was going to be published, anyway, at the end, with her as a prime example of the women she describes in it. All that said, I can understand why some people reacted negatively to the story line, because it does make the main character, who is a very intelligent woman, look foolish and naive, and this book is, in the end, just another version of “woman meets man and is taken in by him and comes to regret it”, but as I said, I did enjoy the journey enough to keep reading to the end.

Look, its got to be pretty horrific when the person youre married to, the person you believe you love, the person you think you know well, the person you share your life withturns out to be a lying psychopath. And its bound to be even more horrific if youre an alleged expert on human nature and relationshipsa marriage counselor or therapist, for example. And worse yet, supposeon top of all this miseryyou have a book coming out that touts your wisdom and insight about marriages and why so many of them go wrong.

So why does so much of this novel take place in the protagonists head? Grace Reinhart Sachs husband Jonathan turns out to be an absolute phony who has lied to his wife about pretty much everything, and this all comes to the fore when the mother of a student at their sons elite NYC prep school turns up murdered. Grace discovers the awful truth about Jonathan and proceeds to slowly rebuild her life. Jonathan himself appears in the story only through Graces memories and as the subject of a police investigation. As a result, this is a thriller with very few thrills. Overall, fairly disappointing. Here’s hoping the HBO miniseries will be better.

**Note to the fictional clients of Grace, the therapist: after ten minutes of a session with her, you should have known shes an insufferable mess.
And to fellow readers of this book: After ten pages we should have known that this book is an insufferable bore.

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