The book "You" - Caroline Kepnes

After the postmodern science fiction and brain-exploding novel "You" by McElroy, I decided to read something stupefyingly simple, plot-driven, and my choice was for the freshly translated thriller "You" by Caroline Kepnes.

I will immediately make a reservation that I have not watched the Netflix series of the same name and am not going to, I am one of those who, to get acquainted with the plot, it is easier to read a book in a couple of hours than to watch the series for a week. As it is clear from the first sentence, I did not expect anything special from the book, I was counting on another female thriller about a maniac inspired by Fowles ' "Collector", but to some extent the novel even pleasantly surprised me.

"You" is a first-person monologue novel written by New York bookstore clerk Joe Goldberg. Joe turns to his beloved Ginevra Beck, whom everyone calls simply Beck (you know, the name Ginevra is not ice). One day she went to the store to buy a book as a gift, and that's when Joe realized: "this is HER." And because they are destined to be together, even if Beck herself does not think so...

"You" has several features that make this novel different from a number of similar ones. First, as I already mentioned, Joe works in a bookstore, which means that part of the action will unfold there, plus, the hero, like a real book snob, will give the reader monologues about Stephen King and Dan

Books are part of the plot and through relations to literature, Kepnes reveals her characters: one fills the list of favorite books with unread works, the second is from a family of book collectors who use them as interior items, and Beck is a writer of words with her own hands, who turns life stories into pretentious modern prose.

Wallace, Delillo, Pynchon, Kerouac, Salinger, Truman Capote, Saul Bellow and many others flash on the pages of "You". It's funny, and it even works for the plot, and not an empty mention in the spirit of "look how well-read I am".

Secondly, in the case of the heroes of "You", we can say that the maniac and the victim are worth each other. Here you don't know which of them to sympathize with and whether to sympathize at all, this is a sick relationship in all respects, even if Joe wasn't a psycho who easily kills people. Joe is quite sincere in his feelings for Beck, but crosses the line in fixing on her: surveillance, stalking, "collecting materials", "removing obstacles" in the form of living people...

In general, it goes further than the already average study of social networks and Google search. Bec, in turn, is just a nasty girl: a liar, a show-off, a gossip girl, an infantile, an erotomaniac who does not try to use people to her advantage and casually hurts everyone close to her. And such a technique, when the reader can show sympathy not in relation to the victim, but to the maniac, is very controversial.

On the one hand, this book, of course, invigorates and shakes up, if Beck was a poor lamb, you could die of boredom while reading, just by seducing the wolf of Little Red Riding Hood, well, as the heroine turns on her dynamo machine and you can watch for several hundred pages how Joe tries to bring her to the bed stage without any physical abuse, only with the help of advice from Maxim magazine.

On the other hand, taking into account the agenda, somehow I don't really like the fact that the reader is inspired with the idea that if a girl with questionable moral qualities, then if she became a victim of a maniac, and it's not a pity, let's better feel sorry for the boy: he just wanted to love and be loved. This is something from the category "I put on a short skirt - it's my own fault".

As for the plot, it is clearly not the strongest link here. The feeling that Kepnes came up with an idea (a well-read guy with maniacal tendencies falls in love with a girl, and she is not a cake, but he still idealizes her and tries to fool her), even more or less thought out the characters, even if she filled them with characteristics over the edge, well, okay, but it turned out to be an impossible task to compose what they should do so that 350 pages of the reader would be interested in watching them.

As a result, the plot is like a jelly that is not completely frozen: it spreads, and then it freezes in such a spread form. The plot winds up extra circles, extra characters appear in the course of the action, unnecessary stories are included (for example, Dr. Nicky and Karen Minty), which do not add anything new to what has already been said. Well, the denouement is the most banal, you can guess it even without reading the book, just by reading the annotation, because this is how a good part of the books about maniacs and their victims ends.

I will describe my personal feelings as follows: the book did not coincide 100% with my expectations, so I was interested in something and even liked it. The language is not quite the bottom, in any case, it is easy to identify from a fragment of the text that this is this novel, whereas it is impossible to do this with 99% of modern "best thrillers".

The characters were not an open book from the first pages, and for me there was an intrigue in whether Joe would understand that the real Beck was far from his ideal. The only thing that made me facepalm while reading the novel was erotic scenes. Oh, yes, "You" is also an erotic thriller, here the heroine is obsessed with masturbation and constantly craves attention from men, and therefore behaves accordingly.

And all these wet panties, swollen fly, spread legs, biting lips and everything else that comes with it in the kit, somehow I was not happy at all. I don't know who is excited by this, so I would throw all the erotic scenes to hell, leaving only a few facts of the hero's fixation on the nipples or the fifth point of the heroine, which would demonstrate that she is eager to attract male attention to herself, and that this attention is really attracted.

As for the recommendations, since the site forces me to give them or not to give them, I will put "yes". But, of course, "You" is a purely genre story, and no aerobatics in the field of psychological thrillers.