by Ashley Audrain ★★★☆☆
When I read Ashely Audrain's debut novel The Push, I was impressed. She expertly seemed to capture the realness of a relationship between two people, from its early honeymoon stages to the challenges that being a parent can create and the strain it places on that relationship. Her portrayal of a mother who is worried her kid might be "off" (or possibly downright evil) perfectly teetered between "oh, no, it's all in her head" and "oh, gosh, the kid is bad." Of all the books I read that year, The Push might have been the one that had me thinking about it the most after the fact, and it landed at #7 on my Best Books of 2021 list.
In The Whispers, Audrain once again examines parenthood, this time in the form of a cast of characters all inhabiting a wealthy residential block called Harlow Street. We get to know them through an opening summer barbecue, hosted by the Loverly family. Whitney Loverly is a high-powered corporate executive; her husband Jacob is a globetrotting art dealer; their three children are mostly parented by their nanny, although their 10-year-old son Xavier is a particular challenge for Whitney. Whitney's best friend Blair is a stay-at-home mom devoted to her only child, Chloe, whose husband Aiden is a successful businessman with a wandering eye. Their friends Rebecca and Ben are the only childless couple on the street, but on the surface they also seem the happiest. Mara is a retiree who lives next door to the Loverlys with her husband Albert, but has so little in common with the up-and-comers on her street that she chooses not to attend the party, even though she has nothing else to do.
As often happens in life, looks can be deceiving, and all of the characters harbor secrets, jealousies, insecurities, and issues. The novel centers around an accident that happens to Xavier -- shortly after the party (a party in which all attendees heard Whitney losing her temper and screaming at Xavier), Xavier falls from his 3rd floor bedroom window and ends up in a coma. The yelling at the party wasn't the first time that neighbors had seen (or heard) Whitney lashing out at her child, and the residents of Harlow Street and the surrounding community can't help but wonder if this was more than a random accident.
Audrain starts to unfold pieces of this puzzle by writing chapters from the point of view of the four main female characters. She jumps between different points in time to gradually build out her characters' depth and slowly unfurl the nuances at play the night of the accident. While the particulars are left unrevealed until the end, it seems quite clear that Whitney feels responsible for what happened, and so rather than several suspects, the reader instead is left to gradually uncover the level of depravity among all of the inhabitants of Harlow Street.
And that is my essential problem with this book and its characters: these are all horrible people. While I love a flawed character, there was literally no one in The Whispers I was rooting for. The residents of Harlow Street are adulterous, abusive (both to their spouses and their children), catty, and for the most part reprehensible. At the risk of spoiling moments in a book I hope you don't read, there is one scene where Whitney actually pinches off the oxygen line for several moments to her own son while he's in a coma! Another character sneaks into the Loverlys home, puts on Whitney's lingerie, and masturbates on their bed. Even the most seemingly innocent isn't spared: 7-year-old Chloe (who, somehow, is best friends with Xavier who is 3 years older) is presented as a perfect, easy, and sweet child, only to have it later revealed that she led the kids on the school playground in the bullying of her best friend, during which she told him "nobody would care if you died, and you should just disappear". Maybe Audrain threw this in to try to turn the reader's suspicion more to suicide, but it came too late and just made me even more anxious to stop spending time with these irredeemably flawed characters.
So why three stars and not fewer? Well, the novel clearly produced a visceral reaction for me. And while I would not recommend reading about these abhorrent people, creating outwardly happy and successful but inwardly hideous characters was partly the point, I'm sure. I am hopeful that most neighborhood streets aren't filled with as many lies as Harlow Street, that the level of duplicity isn't all around us and I just can't see it, but I'm also not so naive as to think it doesn't exist. But like with everything in life, the reality likely falls somewhere in the middle, and that's where Audrain lost her way. I could live with a lot of the characters' flaws if they were balanced by at least a few redeemable qualities, but goodness is in starkly short supply in The Whispers. Without some of that balance, the novel just leaves you feeling dirty, and left me rushing to the end so that I wouldn't have to continue hating these people.
While I had high hopes following The Push, The Whispers was clearly a miss for me. Audrain has a knack for tapping into the challenges of motherhood and marriage, and she once again includes the little details that made life on Harlow Street feel very real. But boy was I excited to be done with that reality, and I hope that in her next novel she brings a little more light to counteract the darkness.