I’ve always loved a good mystery. The thrill, the intrigue—a mystery asks its reader to solve the murder as its characters are parsing through the clues, and in doing so, invites its audience into the story in a uniquely immersive way.
When I read the first chapters of Alex Michaelides’ sophomore novel The Maidens, I was certain I’d found one of those elusive mysteries that invites the reader in entirely. It was enthralling: a therapist who specializes in group dynamics; an overly attached and distinctly threatening patient; a call from Cambridge about a student’s death under mysterious circumstances, the only clue to her murder a postcard displaying an ominous Euripides quote.
As the novel progressed, it only became more interesting.
Upon arriving at her alma mater, intent on distracting herself from her deceased husband and comforting her niece Zoe—a current student there, and roommate to the deceased girl—therapist Mariana meets a group of suspicious figures. There’s Fred, an eager Ph.D. candidate who takes to Mariana a little too quickly. Morrison, the groundskeeper who seems to see everything. And then there’s the young and handsome Professor Fosca, a Greek Tragedy expert and charismatic lecturer whose cabal of promising female students, dubbed The Maidens, were all close friends with the dead girl.
Halfway through the book, I was obsessed, reading a few pages in every spare minute I could find. I was fascinated, trying to catalog every clue, my prediction for who the culprit could be changing with every new scene. I was convinced this book was it, convinced that Michalides had written the mystery that would set the standard for my literary year.
The prose was beautiful, and the setting and aesthetic were gloriously academic and eerie. Reading a whodunnit mystery from a therapist’s perspective was wildly thought-provoking, since so many clues were products of the narrator’s professional insight, simultaneously fascinating and unreliable. Every character was a possible suspect, and so every character was deeply psychoanalyzed. There were the perfect number of possible explanations for the murder, and I had predictions, but I wasn’t entirely sure about any of them—
Then I read the ending. And I was horrified.
It was not an academic-delusion-driven or Bacchanalia-esque set of serial murders, committed out of love for ancient Greek poetry and an overly charismatic professor, as I had hoped.
It wasn’t the groundskeeper, nor was it the suspiciously eager Ph.D. candidate who seemed overly familiar with how to quickly traverse Cambridge by boat.
No, the entire plot of the novel revolved around an act of sexual violence. Of grooming, of cheating, of an adult man who victimized a young girl and a therapist who was too blinded by love to see how her husband was abusing her niece, her ward, the girl she treated like a daughter.
Zoe, Mariana’s niece, had used a plot Mariana’s deceased husband had machinated to frame Mariana herself; the killings were the result of abuse-induced delusion culminating in a psychotic break. Rather than employing a brilliant and unexpected twist, Michaelides sensationalized and criminalized a girl whose sweet and timid presentation was a mask for greedy, impassioned, abuse-catalyzed evil.
While I think there is room for discourse surrounding mental illness and mental health in all genres, there is no reason for an awful trauma to be presented as the rationale for a murder mystery. Mental illness is criminalized enough in society; that narrative does not need to be reinforced further.
While I think there is room for discourse surrounding mental illness and mental health in all genres, there is no reason for an awful trauma to be presented as the rationale for a murder mystery.
Out of unease over the ending of the novel, I reevaluated the other depictions of mental illness in the novel and became even more concerned with Michaelides’ depictions of mental health at large.
For example: the mentally ill man from the start of the novel, used to establish Mariana’s capability as a group therapist, is nothing more than a threatening plot device. When he reappears later in the novel—the principle of Chekhov’s gun applies very well to mysteries—he is still purely a narrative device, a threat to Mariana’s safety that highlights the precariousness of her position at Cambridge. There is no sympathy or complexity in his character. A mentally ill man, Michaelides seems to suggest, is someone to watch out for, and nothing more.
Admittedly, Michaelides does not frame Zoe as a girl responsible for her actions. He makes it clear that her history informed her crimes and presents her in a light of threatening and horrifying pity rather than absolute malice—something evident from the descriptions of her life in the mental hospital she is placed in at the end of the novel. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a mentally ill and traumatized girl who is presented as the novel’s agent of death.
There is so much potential in a mystery for an evil act to be explored and an evil person brought to justice. It doesn’t always need to be pretty or perfect, but a good mystery always presents a reader with an unspoken contract: the reader will suspend their disbelief, categorize clues, and be suspicious of every character. In turn, the novel promises to surprise the reader with a satisfying end they didn’t see coming.
A novel that sensationalizes trauma and abuse into a threatening evil breaks this contract. Rather than a fulfilling end, or even a thrilling and chilling reveal, Michaelides instead used his novel to present mental illness as synonymous with danger and to engage in the Freudian tradition of using the stories of abused women merely to further the plot of his work.
A novel that sensationalizes trauma and abuse into a threatening evil breaks this contract.
Michaelides’ novel had a chillingly promising start, and certainly played beautifully into the aesthetics of academia and Greek tragedy, as he likely intended. However, talent does not make up for indelicacy, and I think that Michaelides would benefit from reevaluating his understanding of mental illness. Though hard topics can—and should—be explored through the medium of engaging thrillers and mysteries, it’s vital that the topics are approached with nuance and care, and not unambiguous vilification.
Alex Michaelides was born on the small Mediterranean island of Cyprus, to an English mother and a Greek-Cypriot father. He was fortunate enough to grow up in a house full of books. His mother amassed a small library and all the authors who later influenced him as a writer – Charles Dickens, Evelyn Waugh, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Robert Graves, Henry James – were taken off the shelves and handed to him by his mother with the instruction ‘to read’. (An action she possibly regretted when he became a struggling writer!)
The Maidens can be purchased here.
BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW 