Review: 'Dream Girl' by Laura Lippman
Pub. Date: 7/1/2021
Publisher: Faber & Faber
How can a woman who never existed come back to haunt you?
Gerry Anderson has been having trouble sleeping. He's unwell - bed-bound - and has only his night nurse and his personal assistant for company. But what's really troubling him are the phone calls. Phone calls from a woman claiming to be the 'real' Aubrey.
But that can't be. Aubrey's just a character Gerry made up in a book, years ago.
Can Gerry see past the ever-blurring lines of fact and fiction and figure out who is threatening him, or has his long-overdue moment of reckoning finally arrived?
Culture moves fast, especially nowadays. There are a few key milestones that stand out, but with social media events and movements hardly ever get more than their allotted fifteen minutes of fame. There is too much coming at us at once. But this is also taken advantage of when it comes to certain things. #MeToo dominated social media and the cultural and political conversation for quite some time and it still echoes through in our interactions with one another. Women keep coming forward, keep making themselves heard, and the other side, made of up both men and women, keeps hardening in their stance against it. #MeToo, started by Tarana Burke, changed the cultural conversation in that interactions between men and women were looked at in a new light, which showed the daily microaggressions and the casual misogyny that makes up the day-to-day lives of many women. Novels have tackled this in a variety of ways, some more successfully than others. In Dream Girl, Lippman lets her male main character ponder all these changes, the ways in which his behaviour, looking back, perhaps wasn't ideal. But just as he feels unable to truly blame himself, so our cultural conversation keeps moving away from really addressing the key issues. But maybe, with novels such as Lippman's that employ their analytical gaze with the precision of a scalpel, we can get closer and closer.
Gerry has fallen. He lives in a fancy new apartment with a terrifying open staircase and late at night, after a phone call he can't quite be sure he didn't make up, he fell right down it. So now he is bedridden, reliant on his trusty assistant and a night nurse. But as he should be healing, he feels he is slowly losing his mind. Who is calling and pretending to be Aubrey? And why would anyone want to harm him? He's always been good and upstanding... hasn't he? When the actions of the mysterious Aubrey begin to escalate, you simply can't help but wonder what is going on and who is the one lying. One of the most impressive feats of Dream Girl is Lippman's characterization of Gerry. As the novel starts you see him as a kindly, older man for whom the world and culture moves a little too fast. As the story unravels, as we get to see how his mind works, our view begins to change. It's such a slow, careful unravelling of a character that you're almost unaware of how your perception is changing until it already has. It is careful, razor-sharp and so utterly recognizable.
This is actually my first book by Laura Lippman which I myself also couldn't quite believe. I was immediately drawn in by her writing, by the way in which she unnerved the reader and kept everything balancing on a knife's edge. While some of the characters are mild caricatures, this was all done with a wink to the reader. When, as an author, you write a main character that is also an author, you get to play around with your own profession a bit, but also with the genre and reader expectations. Gerry goes through the typical trials and tribulations, the pushy publisher, the request for sad memoirs, the hype of a success that is never quite matched. As the reader, we have to ask ourselves whose story we are really reading. The unreliable narrator is nothing new, but trying to decide who exactly is narrating makes it all a little bit more enjoyable and tricky. I had a great time reading this novel and honestly didn't want to put it down, for either coffee or dinner. There was something compulsive about the need to find out what happens, similarly to how you're on the edge of your seat during a revenge film. You want everyone to get their just deserts, but you're also figuring who actually deserves to be punished. With Dream Girl Lippman has absolutely won me over and I can't wait to dig into her other books.
I give this book....
Dream Girl was impossible to put down, a great character study and commentary on gender, literature and our pre-COVID times!
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