I can’t remember why I chose to purchase Evelyn, After by Victoria Helen Stone, but I think it has something to do with my book club’s prompt of “a book that starts with the first letter of your name.” And the premise intrigued me: Evelyn, mostly happily married wife of a prominent psychiatrist, is called in the middle of the night to get his car out of a ditch. But it turns out he’s not alone. He’s got a woman with him. His patient. With whom he’s been having an affair. And then later, Evelyn learns that someone is dead.
I thought this would be a kind of twisted book of the complacent-housewife-turns-avenging-angel-or-demon sort of story, where I’d watch her slow unraveling as her husband and the patient’s (Juliette’s) lives also come unwound. I thought it would be a psychological thriller sort of thing. Instead, it was kind of like a coming of age story (or middle age), filled with infidelity on both sides and lies all around, and Juliette’s unwitting husband smack-dab in the middle.
The book is split into “before” and “after” chapters: before Evelyn meet’s Juliette’s husband, Noah, and after. While I do believe the character of Evelyn is fairly nuanced, everyone else is background to fulfill her self-discovery—even Noah, whom with she rather quickly starts an affair. And while the alternating timelines are clever, fitting in revelations from the past before they become pertinent in the present, I feel like “After” Evelyn changes too much too fast. Which, perhaps, is what happens in a mid-life crisis, but what do I know?
If Evelyn had felt more regret for starting the affair, even more than a passing thought towards Juliette and how she was deceiving Noah, I feel like it would have felt more natural. But rather than spending time with those sorts of thoughts (how her affair would hurt her teenage son Connor doesn’t even cross her mind, when she was hyper-concerned with how her husband’s affair would affect him), instead we get long passages of sexual encounters. Like…sigh…I know, I know, I’ve already talked about how little I like sex scenes before. And some people really enjoy them. But…this is close third person narration. And we are in Evelyn’s head so much. Completely and totally there. And we get it already. You like that sex and the secret of cheating. I don’t need every detail. I don’t want this close of narration for pages and pages. You sure don’t spend more than a few paragraphs of the entire book on your barely-there teenage son (sorry, I’m talking to Evelyn right now).
If I had known so much of the book would focus on the affair of Noah and Evelyn, and the physical acts therein, I wouldn’t have read the book. I kept reading for the inevitable reveal of how Evelyn found Noah in the first place, and Noah’s reaction. I kept waiting for things to spiral out of control, or for Evelyn’s jealousy and desire for revenge that was promised in the blurb to take effect. But…the reveal was disappointing. The revenge, off-camera. The time skip at the end? Completely destroys the payoff.
This book was decent enough, I guess. Evelyn herself went through a lot and grew as a person (although, in my opinion, most of the growth happened off-screen during the time jump), and that’s all you can really expect from a coming-of-age novel of self-discovery. But I was disappointed in the end.
P.S. Noah works in an art gallery, and Evelyn used to paint, so they of course have an automatic ~*connection*~. At one point, Evelyn shows Noah a nude painting she did twenty years before. He examines it, strokes it, as though it’s her, and it’s supposed to be titillating. I don’t paint often, but I know I would be ultra annoyed if this guy I’ve only known for a day was putting his ungloved mitts all over my favorite oil painting that I made.
Okay. That is all.
Ellie Reads ~ a lot 