I just finished reading See Jane Run by Joy Fielding (amazon.com
There are spoilers ahead. After some debate, I came to the conclusion that trying to say something meaningful about a work without addressing what happens in it is a recipe for… well, at best complication, and at worst worthless crap. Other people do it well, but I’m not even going to try.
So Jane’s husband, Michael, is molesting Emily, their little girl.
Of course, you don’t know this at the beginning. You don’t know anything at the beginning, and neither does Jane. She has amnesia, and she comes to herself standing on a street corner, covered in blood and remembering nothing about her life. From there, Jane eventually goes to the authorities, is (luckily enough) recognized, and then reunited with Michael.
Michael is not just a pedophile. He’s also a psychopathic asshole.
The bulk of the book, and the bulk of its appeal, lies in the mounting sense of desperation that keeps building… building… building, after Jane is returned to her husband. She doesn’t ever really know precisely what is happening, but Michael acts strangely, over medicates her, and keeps a tight watch on her movements through Paula, the housekeeper who is in love with him (she doesn’t know for most of the book that Michael is a psychopathic pedophile asshole).
Paula also doesn’t know that Michael molested her daughter, and several other of his patients’ children.
SPOILER ALERT!!!!: Michael is a pediatrics surgeon.
Anyway, back to the book’s appeal. What works is that even though you don’t ever really know what’s going on (although if you’re a big fan of Lifetime original movies, you might have guessed within the first few chapters), you understand that Jane is being smothered by everyone around her, and not just her husband. It’s as though the world has stacked the deck against her, and, in fact, it has. Why? Is the big question, but once again, it’s secondary. The tension is from the situation itself, which is evocative and frightening.
I wonder how much power inherent in that situation (which was still damn powerful) was lost on me, a white, middle-class male. In lots of ways, it resonates on an almost allegorical level with the kind of struggle women and minorities in America have had to go through/are currently still going through. Mostly, though, it’s simply exciting and atmospheric. If you want a distilled version (that is also distinctly feminist), check out The Yellow Wallpaper (here). It’s basically the same idea, only the smother-ers are, presumably, well meaning idiots instead of psychopathic pedophiles. (If you do read The Yellow Wallpaper, no doubt for the 30th time since you entered your schooling years, also read this explanation by the author of why she wrote it.)
Also, once you “figure out” exactly what Michael is up to, you do, of course, burn for him to get his come-uppance. Jane doesn’t exactly kill him and piss on the still-warm body, but the ending is satisfying all the same.
What doesn’t work isn’t even something that is the book’s fault. I felt, and feel, that the novel was simply too long for the story it told. It clocked in at 404 pages as a mass-market paperback, when 300 would have more than sufficed. Careful revision would have undoubtedly resulted in a much tighter, more effective, more thrilling, action-packed novel with genuinely interesting (perhaps even “literary”) prose.
Unfortunately, I think that’s just a symptom of our times. Prose is bloated for the sake of bloat, both to add length to the story (and likely perceived value by the consumer), and also to make each individual sentence/paragraph/chapter less of a burden on the reader. Most ideas are repeated several times before the author moves on, which makes it a simple affair to read the book in snatches, or skim most sections, or even skip a paragraph, all without ever stumbling over what has gone before.
Again, this is not the author’s fault, as she presumably wants to make an actual living writing novels. This is just what works. There are several well-written passages scattered here and there, and overall, the novel is far more competent than most, all indicating she could do “better,” were the market oriented in that direction.
In case you’re interested, the best line in the novel is the very first:
“One afternoon in late Spring, Jane Whittaker went to the store for some milk and some eggs and forgot who she was.”