Stylishly written bestseller
THE first “hot” novel of 2018 is Leila Slimani’s international blockbuster, which has just been translated into English. But, be forewarned: those readers sure to be most curious about it are the very readers who would do best to avoid it. The last thing working mothers with young children need to be reading in their nanosecond of downtime is this psychological suspense novel about a “perfect” nanny who snaps.
The book aspires toward the taut elegance of that classic nanny nightmare tale, Henry James’
and, in language and complexity, it comes pretty darn close. Indeed, Slimani’s novel won France’s most prestigious literary honour, the Goncourt Prize, when it was published there in 2016 – the first Moroccan-born woman to be so honoured.
The opening sentences of warn us that this is a story in which the worst that can happen and, in fact, just has:
“The baby is dead. It took only a few seconds. The doctor said he didn’t suffer. The broken body, surrounded by toys, was put inside a grey bag, which they zipped shut. The little girl was still alive when the ambulance arrived... On the way to the hospital, she was agitated, her body shaken by convulsions... Her lungs had been punctured, her head smashed violently against the blue chest of drawers.”
The two children have been murdered by their long-time nanny. Their mother, Myriam, discovers this grotesque scene upon her return home to the family’s small apartment in Paris. Again, this discovery occurs within the opening pages of the novel, so the intrigue here derives not from what has happened, but why?
The nanny, Louise, is the central enigma of Slimani’s novel – a human black hole who swirls into the family’s living room one day and relentlessly pulls in and extinguishes the light in everyone’s lives. As unflinching as Slimani is in her descriptions of the grisly damage that can be inflicted on the human body, she’s just as assured in assessing mental and emotional bruises and breakages, particularly as they develop in the intricate relationship between Louise and her employers.
Myriam (like Slimani herself ) is Moroccan-French and, though she has confronted racism in Paris, refuses to hire any North Africans: “She fears that a tacit complicity and familiarity would grow between her and the nanny. That the woman would start speaking to her in Arabic... asking her all sorts of favours in the name of their shared language and religion. She has always been wary of what she calls immigrant solidarity.”
The couple has interviewed a parade of unsuitable women before the birdlike, middle-aged Louise walks in, perfectly perfect in every way down to her prim Peter Pan collar. In a few short weeks, Louise takes charge, not only of the two children, but also of their needy parents.
As Louise becomes increasingly untethered from reality, we learn more about her own grim family background and the miserable apartment she returns to every evening, which she regards as a mere “lair, a parenthesis where she comes to hide her exhaustion”.
Poetic phrases like that abound throughout the novel and elevate it well above its formulaic premise, one that has inspired many a Lifetime television movie. But, the irony is that, for all its fine language, the book has pretty much the same feminist backlash message: namely, there is no “perfect nanny”; indeed, the nanny who’s tending to your children may well be a psycho. Is any career worth that risk, ladies? – Washington Post