Vile people doing a lot of vile things
Novel is a nasty tale that ends with a head-scratcher
The Golden Cage
Camilla Läckberg, translated from the Swedish by Neil Smith Knopf
A 30-something trophy wife named Faye Adelheim suspects she may be nearing her expiration date: Her megabucks entrepreneur husband, Jack, is bored in the bedroom. Faye has been researching Jack’s sexual fantasies by accessing the history on his home computer and readies herself in the couple’s luxurious Stockholm apartment for his return from a business trip.
Camilla Läckberg describes the results in dirty detail, but we already know this marriage can’t be saved, for Läckberg prefaces this sordid sizzler of an opening with a one-page introduction, referring to events that take place much later in the novel. In that preface, Jack (referred to as Faye’s “ex-husband”), has just been arrested for the murder of the couple’s young daughter.
Läckberg has made a career out of writing ingenious psychological suspense stories about vile people doing vile things. The Golden Cage tells a nasty tale about entrenched male domination in a supposedly enlightened society; great wealth and the soul rot it can breed; and the payback — oh, the sweet, sick payback of a woman used and spurned.
A beautiful young woman from the small vacation town of Fjällbacka, the teenage Faye arrives in Stockholm to study at the prestigious Stockholm School of Economics. There she falls into an erotic relationship with the charismatic Jack Adelheim and collaborates with him and his best friend in launching a telemarketing company called Compare that becomes fantastically lucrative. After her marriage, Faye willingly transforms into a glitzy showpiece. On a shopping trip, she smugly thinks to herself: “Stockholm was a jungle in which she and a handful of other millionaires’ wives were the queens.”
After his infidelity, and the couple’s divorce, she will found another, even more successful company called Revenge.
Läckberg ’s prose style is flat and direct. Readers aren’t taxed to unpack imagery or allusive language. Here’s Faye — again, from that steamy first scene — lustfully spying on her husband as he raids the refrigerator:
“The light in the fridge lit up his face and she couldn’t take her eyes off him. She loved him. Loved his broad back. Loved his big hands, which were raising a carton of juice to his lips. Soon they would be on her ... Dear God, how she longed for that.”
There are hints embedded throughout the novel that Faye has perpetrated acts of violence in her childhood and youth. Who knows what she may be holding out on us?
Readers will find out the answer to that question in the last sentence of this novel.
Unless I’ve missed some crucial clue, I can’t see how the ending of The Golden Cage makes any sense. But if you read all the way to the end, you’re probably not primarily concerned with rational satisfactions anyway.
The Washington Post