The Silent Patient Review (Spoiler Warrning)

I have discovered this novel the same way I discovered many others-through positive recommendations on social media, including goodreads. ‘The Silent Patient’ was cited as keeping readers in suspense and with an effective plot twist. I was able to prevent myself from reading any spoilers before reading the actual book, but I must say that I found it and the whole book in general so disappointing that I don’t think I would have cared anyway.  The narrator felt very much like ‘tips fedora’ nice guy and although there is a lot of talk about his extremely traumatizing childhood, he was so painful to read through I struggled not to skim through half of the novel.

Alex Michaelides’s debut novel starts with the introduction of Alicia Berenson who is introduced as the murderer of her husband, Gabriel and who is now in a high security mental institution. Her silence about the bloody murder is notable, especially as she is a famous painter and her husband was a notable fashion photographer. One of the people interested in her story and convinced he could help her is Theo Faber, a criminal psychologist. Seemingly, his interest is professional, but as the time goes, it becomes obvious that there is more to it.
The premise of the novel is quite interesting, and I wanted to find out more about Alicia and Gabriel’s marriage as they seemingly were ‘couple goals’. However, as Alicia’s diary is introduced to the story, there are cracks that are beginning to show in the entries, especially in terms of her own childhood and her mental health. I hate to disappoint, but at the end this does not mean much for development for her character, as she still felt largely underdeveloped at the end of the novel. Some of the entries related to the man she believes stalks her do play into the big plot twist at the end, but for me it was too little too late.

Michaelides brought a lot of his Greek heritage into this book (and in ‘The Maidens’) and even directly quotes from a Greek tragedy as a plot point which I usually enjoy. Sadly, in this case that meant that Alicia still read as a Greek tragedy heroine rather than her own person. There was nothing distinct about her at all for me, and I think this is largely because of the choice of the narrator who is not able to look beyond himself and his needs and veers needlessly into misogyny.

The narrator is the aforementioned Theo Faber. He is a criminal psychologist moving to the institution she is placed in because he believes he can get her to talk about what happened. The whole time Theo worked with Alicia I kept thinking to myself that surely this is not how therapy works, even in a situation like this? Theo is doing ‘investigations’ into her family members, although he is told by his boss not to do that anymore. While I can understand the idea that this is in order to find out more about his patients, it felt too invasive and boundary stomping. Not to mention, none of the information he found out made any difference to the final outcome anyway. I suppose that they were unsuccessful attempts to set red herrings.

In addition to this plot, Theo is also frequently focusing on his marriage that is failing because of his wife’s affair that he accidently found out about. Instead of confronting his wife or asking for a divorce or doing anything you’d expect, he decides to follow her and her affair partner. In so many of the scenes, Theo describes this in heavy detail and we are expected to believe that they never ever saw him? At one point, he was in this man’s yard and still nothing? Again and again, the author attempts to raise suspense only for it to fizzle out without any satisfying outcome.

SPOILER ALERT!


Now, we get to the biggest issue I have with ‘The Silent Patient’-the plot twist. In the meeting of the two plots, it turned out that Theo’s wife’s affair partner was actually Gabriel and that he was the man that was stalking Alicia. He is the one who killed Gabriel and his whole reason for wanting to treat her was to see how much she knows and remembers of the night it happened. That’s it. That’s the whole plot twist of this book. I am perplexed as to why so many readers believed this to be such a revolutionary ending and discovery. It was cheap, seen before and there were just too many plot holes and details that the author expects his readers to believe in for it to work well.

The reason for Alicia’s silence is simply because she felt like she died already? I couldn’t believe that was it. That was the whole reason this woman did not speak for years after being accused of a heinous crime and drugged up to the point she was described as drooling at one point. At the end, she does speak with Theo and reveals this to him, as well as give him her diary to help him understand this. Another issue with this is that once he realizes he is implicated, Theo injects her with enough drugs to put her into a coma. However, after she realizes this, Alicia still has time to write a diary entry that implicated Theo in the murders and hide it in her painting so that he can’t find it.

At the end, as a woman, this left such an awful taste in my mouth. Theo is an awful person, and while he does get his comeuppance for his actions after the diary is found, I absolutely hated reading a story from his perspective. He has one positive relationship with a woman in his life that is his own therapist Ruth but even then I was shocked by the amount of breaking boundaries in that relationship. Although they are now friends, he is still showing up at her doorstep at night seeking advice, and then deciding to do everything opposite of that. Every other female character is depicted in an exclusively negative light. Even Alicia, who is supposedly a fascinating woman who is driving the plot, does nothing but talk about her husband, sits in coffee shops on hot days and occasionally paints, at least judging by her diary. While some men in the novel receive vitriol from this narration, it is nowhere as gendered as for women.

To be honest, I could find a lot more issues with this novel, but suffice to say, I did not enjoy it at all. I did also read his other novel ‘The Maidens’ that was slightly better, but still had some issues as ‘The Silent Patient’. I believe that Michaelides simply is not an author for me as I do not enjoy any element of his writing. I rated both books ⅖ on goodreads. 

source: twitter.com