Summary of the Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

“The real motivation was purely selfish. I was on a quest to help myself. I believe the same is true for most people who go into mental health. We are drawn to this profession because we are damaged—we study psychology to heal ourselves.”

I am very glad I finally finished this one, as it has been highly anticipated ever since I shelved it sometime last year. Seeing all the rave reviews and the Goodreads award, of course this was on my list—not to mention, as a classicist, my ancient mythology/literature radar went ping ping ping at this book (and Michaelides’s follow up, which I must also read, naturally). With an intriguing premise and the promise of a great mystery thriller, I was set and dived right in (while reading my previous book, actually…yes I get distracted rather easily).First, I should mention, there are some glaring oversights of psychology and of mental health professionals in this book, which is rather disappointing actually. Apparently the author did an internship or some such thing in a mental health ward, but it must have been vastly different in those days, or he has idealized it for his book. (Given his experience as a screenwriter, I am leaning towards the latter.) I am no psychologist, clearly, but even I could tell things seemed off. In the novel, a character thinks: “I thought suddenly; yes, it was unprofessional and highly improper conduct, but I was desperate, and I needed help.” Throughout the course of the novel, multiple professionals in the book profess such attitudes, either directly or indirectly through their actions. It is baffling. I can’t qualify the misusage, but Dr. Appu Sasidharan’s review has a wonderful overview of the psychological inaccuracies of the book. Carol’s review also highlights a lot of glaring discrepancies and concerning trends in this book. If you consider that Michaelides comes from a screenwriting background, it is easier to take this book a little less seriously—for better or for worse—and treat it more like a movie, rather than a novel. In some ways, I think this novel would be great as a movie. The chapters are fairly short and easy to read, which meant that it was a ‘page turner’ for me for most of the novel, particularly as we get towards the end. Michaelides does not use complicated, flowery language, and the chapters are fairly to-the-point in terms of keeping the action on page—though we do get plenty of internal monologuing as well. Still, it isn’t as egregious as in some other authors; and appreciating a heavy dose of plot-focused writing, I found his writing style quite easy to digest. Yet the plot was fairly formulaic and the big ‘twist’ was flagrantly clear to me from quite early on—and I am not a mystery/thriller buff. Other reviews have detailed the ephemeral plot holes or randomly placed red herrings, so suffice it to say that this is more like a chunky, mismatched soup than a creamy, well-blended one. But… I couldn’t stop eating it (if we are to keep with the soup metaphor). For starters, I had to see if my assumptions were correct (they were, how mundane), and how the author would resolve everything (things are quite cheesy in the resolution and a tad bit unrealistic occasionally). The ending felt like a movie ending rather than something that would realistically happen, but by the point I had figured out the twist earlier in the book, I had lowered my expectations and coasted along on pure page-turning alone—turns out, the less I give a fuck, the less pedantic I end up being about my reading experience. Who knew?While I found myself not caring about most of the characters, I do think the author’s attempt to portray the main character’s psyche was a fascinating project. The side characters are merely relational to the main character and have fairly static personalities, but once you finish the book, you can’t really begrudge that—it makes sense within the context of the narrative, anyhow. There is an interesting Hitchcockian ‘twist’ element in the telling of the narrative that wasn’t anything novel, but enjoyable to see Michaelides employ nonetheless. I stand by my statement that this would make a more captivating film than book. Like a Greek tragedy, the characters are driven by the Fates on their unhappy predetermined courses—and like a terrible tragedy, you can’t help but stare at the awful aftermath. You reap what you sow, and everything comes back to you in the end.This novel may not live up completely to its hype, but it was still a fast-paced and somewhat easy read—which is always nice, as a kind of palate cleanser. The characters aren’t terribly gripping, the plot a bit formulaic, and the twists predictable, but that is my experience of it—clearly others found it much more compelling. One aspect I really enjoyed was Michaelides’s thoughtful insertion of Greek mythology and literary references—from the characters’ names to the Euripides play, Alcestis, that structures the stage upon which this novel rests. This was clearly a long-term passion project of sorts for him, and it is nice to see an author breakthrough in such a spectacular way for a debut novel. I believe I will enjoy his sophomore novel a bit more, since it deals with classics and academic themes a bit more directly, but I surely hope he has done more of his research this time around.