Title: The Girl on the Train Author: Paula Hawkins
Published: January 13, 2015
Genre(s): Mystery/Thriller
Page Count: 325
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Rachel catches the same commuter train every morning. She knows it will wait at the same signal each time, overlooking a row of back gardens. She’s even started to feel like she knows the people who live in one of the houses. “Jess and Jason,” she calls them. Their life—as she sees it—is perfect. If only Rachel could be that happy. And then she sees something shocking. It’s only a minute until the train moves on, but it’s enough. Now everything’s changed. Now Rachel has a chance to become a part of the lives she’s only watched from afar. Now they’ll see; she’s much more than just the girl on the train...
As one of the more hyped adult releases of early 2015, The Girl on the Train promises a lot. Does Paula Hawkins deliver on those promises? Honestly: no. I did not find this novel to be anything truly groundbreaking, though it was one of the rare books where I didn’t guess the conclusion within the first 10 pages, which I appreciated. Overall, I found this book to be quite readable, but also a bit too dramatic and eager to add in plot complications, making the story seem almost farcical.
One thing this book does have going for it is how utterly annoying and/or disgusting all of the main characters are. None of them are even remotely “likeable” by nearly any stretch of the word. Hawkins’ protagonist and primary narrator, Rachel Watson, for example is a depressed alcoholic who is frequently blackout drunk (and therefore unreliable) is obsessed with her ex-husband and the mistress he married, and she frequently calls their house and shows up in their neighborhood. This is the woman who tells the story; this is the woman the reader of The Girl on the Train is supposed to, at least in some part, invest in. And I do think that Hawkins did a good job with it—the mystery at hand is who killed Megan, and because any one of the characters could conceivably have had a motive, it’s hard for the reader to choose a side. Really, there are none.
Yet as much as I appreciated Hawkins’ presentation of her characters, I found that the first-person narration itself (divided between Rachel and two other women) wasn’t very good. It’s all telling, no showing. What we do get in scene is filtered after the fact. The reader is always conscious of the narrator’s presence, and never gets to experience events, because they’re being told to us. Worse, at one point, the ex-husbands new wife sits the reader down and says “I miss being a mistress. I enjoyed it. I loved it, in fact.” Nobody thinks like this in real life, with such clarity and self-awareness. It just seemed sloppy and poorly done on the author’s part, to have the character diagnosing and explaining their own motivations so unsubtly, especially since such self-analysis seemed to out of character, as in the next paragraph, she was declaring that she was “going to make that bitch pay” or something equally juvenile.
And that brings me to my main complaint regarding The Girl on the Train: it never felt real. These characters were always characters to me, never people. The drama, as it unfolded, was just too neat; the scenes were just a bit too colorful. The nearly flamboyant presentation and atmosphere Hawkins adopted seemed to me like she was overwriting, trying too hard to sell this story. And it became too much altogether. For me, this novel often read like a play or a television drama—one without the grounding influence of reality.
Yet even with that complaint, I cannot deny that this book is compulsively readable and fast-paced. I wasn’t even sure if I was enjoying the book, and I couldn’t help but fly through the pages. It’s a quick, easy read. As I said, the identity of Megan’s killer was actually one I hadn’t anticipated several hundred pages in advance, which I appreciated, but at the same time, it wasn’t a very rewarding conclusion either. It came too fast and, compared to the rest of it, was far too understated. I’d flipped the page and Rachel was epiloguing before I realized I’d missed the climax completely. Which, I suppose, goes to show that Hawkins’ driving pace was just a bit too fast, as the most important scene got swept up in all the mess and was too easily missed. It wasn’t that The Girl on the Train lacked emotional resonance so much as that conclusion didn’t feel as if it made the rest of the book worth it, in some way. I wasn’t disappointed; I just expected more.
All the same, I think Paula Hawkins’ debut is promising, and it was still an entertaining book. There was a tendency to overwrite, a lack of character depth, and a rushed conclusion, but nevertheless, I think The Girl on the Train was just engrossing and interesting enough to make it worth my time. I certainly appreciated what Hawkins was trying to do here, though that doesn’t at all cancel out the weaknesses of the text itself.
