Welcome to ‘Single White Female’ With a Maternal Twist

MAGPIE, by Elizabeth Day

“What’s she going to do?” wonders Marisa, the nervous, eager-to-conceive girl in “Magpie,” Elizabeth Day’s fourth novel. “In an affordable movie — the sort that she watches on cable channels within the afternoons mendacity on the couch when she ought to be working — the wronged girl would pack her baggage and go away the home in a match of righteous indignation.”

However, after all, Marisa does no such factor. What enjoyable would that be?

From the very starting, we fear for Marisa, the form of doomed heroine who doth-insist-too-much that she’s discovered the proper man and the proper home to start what she believes would be the excellent life. Because the novel begins, she’s simply moved in with Jake, a good-looking advisor, after a whirlwind romance and the one attainable impediment seems to be the sudden intrusion of Kate, a lodger who strikes in to assist the couple economize as they plan for the long run — foremost, having a toddler. “However nothing stayed excellent collectively, did it?” Marisa thinks to herself. And, in truth, issues go awry with exceptional velocity.

Early in “Magpie,” a twist comes that made me gasp out loud. And it’s the form of twist that makes you re-evaluate the whole lot you’ve learn earlier than. And the twist marks the novel — at the least for its first two-thirds — as one of many Grand Guignol college of thrillers of which Gillian Flynn stays the present grasp and, as a lot as numerous ebook jackets in recent times have asserted in any other case, few have approached her virtuoso, go-big-or-go-home strategy. These novels — very similar to their cinematic equal, Brian De Palma’s giddy, baroque and self-referential thrillers — place their characters in more and more excessive conditions, requiring them to make hairpin turns or Jekyll-Hyde transformations that danger straining credibility. We watch Marisa, Jake and Kate make decisions that pressure credibility or at the least consistency of character. However realism isn’t the purpose. It’s not about how issues are however how they really feel — and the deeper truths that may be mined inside that feeling.

The spiraling vitality on the middle of the novel captures the way in which fertility struggles can function a tripwire, upturning the whole lot else in a single’s life, laying naked all one’s vulnerabilities.

As we’ve seen with novels like Jessica Knoll’s “Luckiest Woman Alive,” this expressionistic model could be a wildly efficient technique of excavating the pains and terrors of poisonous relationships, associate violence, trauma, psychological sickness. Within the case of “Magpie,” the near-constant fever pitch of the narrative matches the way it feels to be struggling by means of being pregnant anxiousness, fears of romantic betrayal, in-law strife, physique horror. And the spiraling vitality on the middle of the novel captures the way in which fertility struggles can function a tripwire, upturning the whole lot else in a single’s life, laying naked all one’s vulnerabilities.