The Girl on the Train
by Paula Hawkins
If Ernest Hemingway were a woman and wrote a spin-off of
Gone Girl, it would look very much like The Girl on the Train. Gone Girl is incredibly crafted to deliver a
psychological punch -- TGotT is a mostly flimsy, slapped-together, predictable
addition to the unreliable narrator genre.
I want to like Rachel, I really do -- she's pathetic in her
earnestness and inability to focus.
She's lost her job, her husband, and any hope of having children. In order to keep up the charade of going to
work, each day she takes the morning train into "work," walks around
all day (usually drinking), and then takes the train home after
"work." Every morning the
train makes a stop that allows Rachel to gaze into the houses built right next
to the track. One of those houses used
to belong to her -- and her ex-husband, with his then-mistress and
now-wife. A few houses down, a seemingly
loving couple lay out on the patio, unaware of Rachel's intense gaze. Rachel names the couple Jess and Jason, and
proceeds to imagine their sophisticated, affection life together.
Except, appearances can be deceiving. Just like Rachel attempts to fool everyone
that she is not an alcoholic and still has a job, it is quite easy to see the
rifts in “Jess” and “Jason”’s relationship.
Rachel conveniently blacks out quite often, enabling her to forget what
she did the day and night before – did she knock on her ex-husband’s door
again? Did she leave drunken voicemail
messages again?
Storylines between Tom (Rachel’s ex-husband), “Jess,”
“Jason,” Rachel, and Tom’s new wife all begin to cross paths more often than
not. I could predict the ending
relatively early in, leaving me to race through supposedly taut and mysterious
scenes in the hopes that something, anything, would surprise me.
