Every Secret Thing. Rating: Execrable

"It was the paradoxical mark of the offensive, in Cynthia's experience, that they were offended so easily."

Plot twists are fun, aren't they, reader? If you somehow discovered that this blog was written by your postman instead of by a woman fleeing the consequences of her brief but notable unraveling, you would be thrilled to pieces. Twists are exciting.

The best part of a good twist is seeing the clues that you missed on the first reading. Watching The Sixth Sense for the first time is exciting because the twist is so unexpected; watching it the second time is exciting because you can see the way that the twist is set up, the little touches that you missed the first time round. Reading a book can be the same way - the twist is exciting, and then the reader looks back over the narrative and realizes: oh, yes, how on earth did I miss that the first time?

A poorly executed twist, on the other hand, is a very effective irritant. A poorly executed twist is the author's way of saying "look at how clever I am! Did you notice how clever I am?" It is a nasty trick played upon a reader who has been invested and supportive for the duration of the book, and I simply cannot abide it.

Every Secret Thing by the somehow critically acclaimed Laura Lippman

...is an absolute mess.

The plot: two young girls, Ronnie and Alice, kidnap and kill a baby. As adults, they are released from prison; shortly thereafter, a child goes missing under similar circumstances. The book follows the investigation of the disappearance of the second child, while slowly revealing the events that, years earlier, lead to the death of an infant and the incarceration of two eleven-year-old murderers.

Let's discuss characterization. Last week, I reviewed Kimberly McCreight's Where They Found Her. McCreight's characters were deeply developed and consistently motivated throughout the story. McCreight established and developed her central characters in a way that made a complex plotline easy to follow. Lippman would benefit a great deal from being struck repeatedly about the head with a copy of Where They Found Her.

Lippman's characters do not move through the plot of her book; rather, they are moved by the plot.  Lippman seems to have had access to a limited quantity of character development, and rather than distributing it among a few primary characters, she sprinkled it gracelessly over several unnecessary auxiliary characters. Because the main characters are so severely underdeveloped, their motivations are brutally buffeted by story developments; they are inconsistent and unbelievable. Lippman seems to revel in their unreliability, playing "gotcha!" with the reader.

Now, for Spoilers.

Ronnie (the troublemaker) and Alice (goody two-shoes, which is an insult I never understood. Is two somehow a snooty number of shoes to possess?) are initially narrated as two children who get into trouble because Ronnie is terrible. The story is framed clearly: Ronnie is a Bad Child who lures Alice into miscreancy. Alice is presented as reluctantly along for the ride; she is too nice for her own good, and a little slow on the uptake. Given that none of the people in the book receive more than a perfunctory varnish of development, I clutched these characterizations as I would a life raft: surely the only things that are at all important about these characters will be maintained throughout the story!

Spoilers, reader. They aren't.

In a finale that has somehow been described as "gripping" by various other reviewers, Lippman suddenly remembers to mention a vast series of plot points that she had forgotten to tell the reader earlier. Oops. It turns out that Alice is the mastermind, and Ronnie is misunderstood and easily manipulated. Ronnie is not a budding sociopath, after all! Surprise.

All is revealed. Alice was the driving force behind the kidnapping, Alice is the perpetrator of the more recent kidnapping. Alice is the bad guy. The sudden reversal of characterization is executed with all the grace of a hippopotamus practicing the tango.

In a crescendo of lazy writing, Ronnie kills herself, because there is no emotional payoff to the narrative otherwise.

Rating: Execrable. 

Possible ratings: Magnificent, Divine, Satisfactory, Tiresome, Lamentable, Execrable. This is a blog about words, what rating system did you expect?