You Should Have Known / Jean Hanff Korelitz

Grace Reinhart is a couples therapist in New York City on the cusp of making the big time with a book that’s getting lots of buzz entitled You Should Have Known. The book is about how couples who face discord later in a marriage really should have seen it coming from the start-- the clues are always there, the fatal personality and relationship flaws obvious from the get-go, but somehow signs are ignored, until later down the line it all goes “kerflooey”.

Grace’s professional standing, her modest but comfortable Upper East Side apartment, son in an exclusive Manhattan private school, husband a doctor with at a prestigious hospital—it all seems so perfect and her bio should look rather nice on the jacket flap of her soon-to-be New York Times bestselling title. But the advice she doles out to her patients and records in her book come back to haunt her—you really should have known, Grace Reinhart.

At times this novel almost reads like Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, but about three quarters of the way through it downshifts and the narrative tension decrescendos rather quickly. I like the characters the author creates, entering Grace’s New York neighborhood, and seeing events unfold in her eyes. If Grace had met up with her husband in the last half of the book, it might have made a better read. But maybe the way it was written was more true to life.

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This novel comes from the 2005 Orange Prize winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin , a disturbing book in which a parent with ambivalent feelings towards motherhood deals with the aftermath of a Columbine-style school killing perpetrated by her son. Lionel Shriver has said that she prefers to create characters that are hard to love, and So Much for That certainly contains some flinty characters, who although they may be hard to love, are nevertheless very believable. The topic this time is healthcare in America. Shep is all ready to launch into an exotic early retirement on the island of Pemba off the eastern coast of Africa, but when his wife reveals a diagnosis of mesothelioma, he must hold on to his job to maintain family health coverage to see her through her devastating illness. His work colleague and friend, Jackson, experiences a medical dilemma completely of his own doing, which proves to be his un doing. Jackson's daughter suffers from an unusual genetic disorde...

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