Review: You Will Know Me

You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This one has been on my list since it came out more than a year ago when a student (thanks, Callie) recommended it to me. I’m glad I waited, though, because outside of a Summer Olympics when the gymnasts get their quadrennial two weeks of fame, this Winter Olympics with its analogous figure skaters is the perfect backdrop for reading this.

As I see it, Megan Abbott is the premier woman writing in noir. I loved her afterward to Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place because it showed the conscious ways in which she sees the potential for bringing a female perspective to the form and its generic concerns. She’s a good writer, that’s clear. More impressively, she’s reinventing the genre in ways I certainly couldn’t imagine.

In place of a detached tough guy who enters a mystery in the capacity of detective – whether formally a detective or incidentally – we get a mother who’s already hip-deep in the world of her family and her child-prodigy daughter’s elite gymnastics world. She isn’t glimpsing some deep unsettling ‘noir’ truth; she’s encountering the dark, then darker, then darkest side of the seemingly perfect family she’s nurtured.

I don’t want to give too much away in the form of spoilers, but this begins with Katie dimly suspecting something dark in the spangled world of her daughter’s gymnastics. There’s a hit-and-run accident – which may not be an accident – and it becomes increasingly clear that it’s connected to an effort to maintain the façade of innocence in their gymnastics world. First we suspect one person, then another, and then finally the real culprit – and it’s the last person we’d have imagined, the one who most represents the supposed happy world. Abbott gets us from one of those suspects to another, gradually unpeeling the red herrings until we’re confronted with what we don’t want to see.

I can see criticizing this for moving slowly. I thought it dragged early, and Callie warned me that it would. She also urged me to stick it out, and I’d glad I did. There may still be room for some tightening in the text early – I don’t want to be too presumptuous with Abbott, who’s taught me to admire her – but I suspect the power of the ending comes in part through its contrast with that carefully sketched world of the opening chapters.

By the end, I found myself holding my breath. It wasn’t a matter of being afraid to find out who did it – Abbott had prompted that realization pretty carefully in the final quarter of the novel. Instead, it had to do with realizing that she really had the guts to end this on such a dark and damning tone.

I admire Abbott in part because her sense of noir incriminates all of us. Here, Katie is a “good mother,” yet that fundamental pose leads her to endorse the worst sorts of crime. This book not only condemns the world of pushed-and-posed girls gymnastics, but it calls into question how complicit we are in our family’s crimes when we justify them in the name of being a parent.

That is a very long way from The Continental Op or Philip Marlowe, but it’s a provocative extension of the same fearless ethical inquiry into how we justify our decisions in the Modern world. I thought Abbott’s Queenpin was really good, but this is even more ambitious. Now, everything she’s written is on my list.


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