Normal Holiday Reading

I first heard of Good Night, My Darling by Swedish author Inger Frimansson through Small Press Distribution. At the S.P.D. site, a listing for the recently translated novel says that Frimansson "is considered by many to be Sweden's premier author of the psychological thriller." As a longtime fan of one of the masters of this genre, Patricia Highsmith, I couldn't resist getting the book, and, as it turns out, the novel evokes Highsmith when it comes to the consciousness of its killer.

Highsmith famously created murderers who seem normal rather than overtly troubled. The violence always makes good sense from the killer's point of view. One can understand, for instance, why Vic Van Allen – small-press publisher and snail-enthusiast from Highsmith's novel Deep Water – drowns the man who has been sleeping with his wife. The two men are in a pool so the water is handy. Vic has been watching his wife cheat on him for a long time, and his method of coping – looking at the situation with a sense of irony that creeps like a snail – only aggravates his disgust.

In Good Night, My Darling, Frimansson gives us a protagonist as oddly passive as Vic. An heiress to a candy fortune, Justine Dalvig has an air of desperate sweetness that doesn't serve her well as a child. When girls at school bully her, she plies them with candy, which only encourages them in their vicious behavior. While trying to escape their cruelty one afternoon, she ends up breaking an ankle and yet still isn't angry. Frimansson describes Justine's reaction to the cast on her leg in the stark style found throughout the novel: "Her leg was put in a cast that reached up to her knee. She felt heavy and happy."

Justine's ankle continues to cause her problems as an adult. In the opening of the novel, she is struggling with this old injury and other hidden psychological ones. The narrative is layered with several points of view, including that of Flora, the stepmother who abused Justine as a child. Slowly, as the various characters sift through their memories, Justine's difficult past comes into view. Frimansson portrays all of these characters, including Flora, with insightful sympathy. As a young bride, Flora tries to win over her new stepdaughter with a present – "a very nice doll, one that she herself would have wanted when she was a girl." When Justine rejects the offering, the vain, pretty Flora, who often is described in doll-like terms – her eyes are "porcelain"; her husband calls her "my little doll" – takes the rejection so personally that she begins to beat the child.

By the time the first murder takes place, moral lines have been blurred so much that killing seems perfectly normal. The conditions are just right, the weapon on hand and easy to use. The motive is as solid from a psychological point of view as frustrated Vic Van Allen's is when he holds his rival's head under the pool. With her layered approach, Frimansson achieves one of the hardest goals of fiction: to make the plot seem like the inevitable result of both events and numerous choices shaped, in part, by character.

Where the book falters has to do with gender. Women tend to reach for poison when they kill, not just because, as a group, they spend more time in the kitchen than homicidal men. They also don't have as much upper-body strength. Not many women, even if pumped up on a heavy dose of adrenaline and malice, would attempt some of the feats that Frimansson ascribes to a female character. Some of the violence in the last third of the book is improbably athletic. In fact, in a couple of places, the killing would come off as ridiculous were it not so tastefully described.

But here is just one suspicious stain on an otherwise wonderful thriller. I recommend the book to anyone as great reading for the holidays. This new English translation put out by Pleasure Boat Studio has a picture on the cover of a sweet young woman and a bird. (Justine has a large bird, rescued from the wild, as a pet.) With its innocent cover, the book provides a great place to hide for the holiday traveler. Instead of getting upset about delayed planes or family conflicts, just open the pages and watch the bodies pile up.

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