“I don’t like to dwell on regrets. They tell you that you have not come to terms with what you’ve done.”
I’ve received several opinions that this book was addictive and brilliantly written. However, to me, it wasn’t neither.
The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair is a thriller with a smidge of detective/crime novel, that won several literary awards, all of them well deserved.
Something that you have to have in mind, while reading this book, is the situation revolving a romance that involves a 35-year-old man with a 15-year-old girl, where we need to make an informed and clear opinion on that. I strongly suggest read the book to the end, and then form an opinion.
This leads to the question that divides worlds: how far is acceptable a relationship between an adult and a teenager (w/ 16/18 yo) with a conscious critical mind (young adult)?
Well, here we meet Marcus Goldman, a writer that reach success with his first novel and finds himself with writer’s block. He asks his mentor and writer, Harry Quebert for help, spends a few days on Quebert’s house and finds out that he maintained a relationship, 35 years prior, with a 15-year-old girl named Nola Kellerman, who ended up missing.
When Nola’s body appears in Quebert’s property, alongside her backpack with Quebert’s manuscript of his (later) successful novel, he gets arrested for her murder. Goldman decides to investigate the murder in order to prove Quebert’s innocence.
Hum, prepare yourselves for the beginning of this book, because it’s slow paced. Mainly focused on Goldman’s life and writer’s block. From a certain moment, the pace is faster and the action unfolder rapidly with twists, discoveries and theories as appears more characters.
The book is divided by chapters, each one with a lesson given by Quebert to Goldman, when he was under his mentorship. Each lesson serves as a preamble for the respective chapter.
I found Goldman very arrogant and superficial but, on the other hand, we can’t detach from him. The reality is that works and, because Goldman is in it, I want to read The Baltimore Boys. I also found the relationship between Quebert and Nola poorly developed. It seemed a superficial, cold relationship.
Despite the author’s efforts to write a deep-felt love, I didn’t feel it at all. I felt it with other characters, though. It might be considered the fact that Dicker did that on purpose in order to make the reader face the reality that it’s a morally reprehensible relationship. I’ll leave that to each other opinion and interpretation.
It’s a very well-constructed thriller. We can guess who did what, but the how and the whole story is very intricate, making hard to predict how everything played out. Time leaps in random years, or even days (considering the timeline of Nola’s disappearance) are very well placed, not confusing at all.
I can say that I loved the satirical reference to typical 70’s marriage and homemaker, in a small community. I also found Goldman’s mom very amusing, over reacting to everything (sometimes forced but still funny). Don’t expect an addictive writing, nor mind blowing plot twists. Expect a realistic, well-constructed thriller, where everything is taken into account, even emotional issues.
Dicker has come to surprise me positively, with the crime thriller, The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer (wrote similarly to Agatha Christie), and then with this great book, despite the writing being different from the prior. Definitely an author to follow.
The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker
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