The Silent Patient

I'm going to start this review off by saying I came across this book in the same way most of its readers did.

... Through the power of social media.

It was everywhere you looked, advertised more frequently than a BetterHelp sponsorship on YouTube. And to be honest, I think I would have gotten much Better Help from them than I would if Theo Faber were my psychotherapist. And that's saying something, considering I'm still debating which platform was more aggressive with their notifications, BetterHelp or Duolingo.

"The Silent Patient" by Alex Michaelides was, in retrospect, a pretty good premise. A woman, Alicia Berenson, is convicted of murdering her husband has gone mute for a few years, hasn't spoken a word since the event, not to or in her own defense. Theo Faber, the main character and narrator with exception to the diary entries of Alicia, is a psychotherapist who is hired for The Grove, a mental institution that houses some of dangerous and mentally unstable patients.

His goal? To get Alicia to speak again through the use of talk therapy. And learn exactly what happened that fateful night of August 25th, the night her husband, Gabriel, was shot five times.

I thought this was a spectacular premise with a lot of promise, the chances to go in multiple directions. Psychological thrillers entice me, and I enjoy the ones that are meant to make you think, put the puzzle pieces together, and keep you involved and invested in the characters along with the story. After all, you can't have a compelling story without fully fleshed out and relatable characters. Right?

Well... that seemed to have been the mark missed in this story.

I'll be frank and brief: the only characters I came to care about somewhat were Alicia and Theo. And I think the only reason was due to the narration being from their point of views. The story is mostly told from Theo's perspective, but there is too much separation between the reader and him, his analytical mind. He tells us about his traumatic past and upbringing, his tumultuous relationship with his parents, but I didn't feel anything in relation to that. I'm not sure if it was the way these elements of the story were written, or Theo was an overall a character I could not like.

Alicia I could relate to on some level due to her narration and point of view being closer to mine than Theo's. I'm not a psychotherapist, I'm not big into psychology, and the only exposure I have to true crime is through the documentaries and YouTube videos I watch. So Alicia, who was not of a psychological and analytical mind, who was emotional, moody, and impulsive, much like myself. Along with her own problematic upbringing and traumatic past, she felt more real, more fleshed out, compared to Theo. There were more layers to her, more to learn about her and know, from the first diary entry to her last in the novel.

But these are the only two characters I could bring myself to remotely care about. And there is a whole cast of characters that play important supporting parts. Alicia's husband, Gabriel, the victim in the horrific murder, who is portrayed as a doting husband from Alicia's perspective but from the testimony of others, was annoyed by her and distant. There is Kathy, Theo's wife, who is depicted as a loving and affectionate woman, the focus of Theo's entire world and happiness, who is playing the stereotypical trope of the unfaithful actress wife.

There are a slew of doctors, attendants, and staff members in the institute that you learn and interact with, but they come across as two-dimensional. Even the brother-in-law to Alicia came across as flat and two-sided as a piece of cardboard. It didn't feel like a character-driven story, and without the fleshed-out dynamic characters, the actual story seemed fall flat on its face.

Then the ending... I don't want to give spoilers, but I truly felt that the ending was a watered down version of "You" by Caroline Kepnes. The twist was unexpected, I was not thinking the elements of that ending would happen, but the events leading up to it were fairly predictable. And the final chapter of the story was unsatisfactory, to be honest. A build up to a final end that didn't come, a form of karmic justice served that felt, to be fair, anticlimactic.

So you may be wondering by now why I give this book 3 stars if these are all the faults I felt about reading it. And I'd be happy to answer it: the premise, and the integration of the different timelines were, in my opinion, brilliantly done. And there was a line in the story that really struck out to me that I felt summed up the entirety of the storyline in one beautiful statement: "... We were crashing through every last boundary between therapist and patient. Soon it would be impossible to tell who was who."

If it was just the characters, the writing, and the sequence of events that brought the story to its pivotal end, I would give this a hard 2.5 stars. Not the worst story I've ever read, not the best, and the furthest thing I would consider a masterpiece. The hype was not worth the story, to be frank. But the premise, the idea, the framework, and the timelines, pushed it to a good 3 stars.

(I might allude to spoilers)
This thriller told from the viewpoint of a psychiatrist makes delightful use of pop psychology tropes and chronological assumptions to deliver a fun twisty tale. Yet I considered many of the main character's actions inconsistent in a way that was not reasonably inconsistent- that is to say, we know that most people have many sides, moods, dimensions, but short of brain injury, excessive drug abuse or coercion people act on their own, personalized, limited spectrums. Some of the characters seemed to have too wide a variety of motivations and behaviors for my credulity. Alas, the characters are plot servants, but since the plot is twisting again like they did last summer, it can be forgiven, mostly.
Maybe I lack empathy because I am prone to bouts of incessant chatter, but I have a really hard time believing that any human being could willfully be silent for the better part of a decade. Carry this to its logical end. She asks for nothing, food or art supplies or cream in her coffee. Especially considering our heroine/victim/traumatized mental health patient is clearly a bit cut off from giving a f about the opinions of others. She is judgy, boring and mehhhhh. Her character as expressed in her diary is just another british chic suspense lit woman- in love and gaslighted, with little imagination beyond settling into her boring upper middle class life successful in her career and of course as a wife and someday mother. Yet we are to believe this utterly conventional woman whining about her husband is an unparalleled genius who transmorgrifies into a complex greek heroine.
I would have liked the book better if it could have been constructed with her as charismatic, chatty, non-repentant-a sort of Caravaggio of violent crime, continuing to wend her way through her world focused on her art, but in choosing silence she becomes not a splendid anchoress or hermit from days of yore but rather a bit of a milquetoast. Though obviously being perpetually silent for years gives you a claim at willpower, one must ask in the context of this book- why? I feel like that is never satisfactorily answered because of course it is a plot device. Our narrator, though he is also afflicted by the same too-wide spectrum of likely behavior previously mentioned, was a bit more satisfying of a character. Still I cannot complain too much, it was completely entertaining and a pleasant way to pass a day.