DNF

I’m adding Kill Your Darlings by Peter Swanson to my Did Not Finish book pile – it goes back to the library before my two weeks are up.

Kill Your Darlings is a murder mystery – actually a few different murders – told in reverse order. The ultimate murder happens first. Equally, the book is about the main characters’ – Thom and Wendy Graves – relationship.

It’s clear from the beginning, that Thom’s a benumbed, thoroughly sodden alcoholic. The probable genesis of his descent into pickledom is the crime the couple plotted together (and Thom executed) decades before.

Thom and Wendy Graves have been married for over twenty-five years. They live in a beautiful Victorian on the north shore of Massachusetts. Wendy is a published poet and Thom teaches English literature at a nearby university. Their son, Jason, is all grown up. All is well…except that Wendy wants to murder her husband.

What happens next has everything to do with what happened before. The story of Wendy and Thom’s marriage is told in reverse, moving backward through time to witness key moments from the couple’s lives—their fiftieth birthday party, buying their home, Jason’s birth, the mysterious death of a work colleague—all painting a portrait of a marriage defined by a single terrible act they plotted together many years ago. (source) 

While the reverse order story telling is a cute device, I don’t think it really serves these characters well (but then, maybe nothing would). They’re predictable, dull, and just not that interesting. Apart from being an incredible lush, Thom’s a failed writer, and given to monologuing. I *think* he’s meant to come off as sad but sympathetic. The alcoholism is, perhaps, his way of coping with the guilt and shame he carries for the murders he committed.

Wendy’s mostly portrayed as being a bit brittle, manipulative, and disdainful. She’s had one book of poems published but that was decades ago. Now she works some random office job that Swanson doesn’t even bother to flesh out. Apart from the occasional murder, Wendy doesn't have a lot going on for herself.

These aren’t intriguing or likable people.

Wendy could have been an admirable, heartless, crafty killer type. The story seemed to be heading in that direction for half a minute but then comes crashing back down to dull domestic intrigue. It barely grazed the realm of cheezy soap opera.

There’s a lot of dead air between actual action or otherwise interesting passages – repetitive tales of Thom being drunk and Wendy being irritated and such. Given that the author’s already told me how the story ends, working back to the original murder – to when Thom and Wendy met in junior high – feels like a lot of effort for too small of a payout. If Swanson was a more talented wordsmith maybe he could have made this work. As it is, Kill Your Darlings should have been a short story or, at most, a novella.

I’ve read that the book’s being turned into a movie with Julia Roberts as Wendy. Perhaps that was what the story was meant to be all all along. Not a mystery novel but a movie proposal, an elaborate film pitch.

Not quite as much but I felt similarly about The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid – that is, it was probably written with movie scripts dancing in the author’s mind. Both, with talented screenwriters, could fall into the rare movie-better-than-the-book category. It could happen. I mean, look at The Witches of Eastwick. I loved the movie even more than John Updike’s well written book. 

No offense intended, just facts, but Swanson and Jenkins Reid aren’t up there in Updike’s sphere.