Summary
Summary
Read the "rollickingly good literary thriller" and New York Times Bestseller -- and watch the HBO Limited Series starting October 25 and starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant.
Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the only life she ever wanted for herself. Devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice, her days are full of familiar things: she lives in the very New York apartment in which she was raised, and sends Henry to the school she herself once attended.
Dismayed by the ways in which women delude themselves, Grace is also the author of a book You Should Have Known , in which she cautions women to really hear what men are trying to tell them. But weeks before the book is published a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only an ongoing chain of terrible revelations. Left behind in the wake of a spreading and very public disaster, and horrified by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must dismantle one life and create another for her child and herself.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This excellent literary mystery by the author of 2009's Admission unfolds with authentic detail in a rarified contemporary Manhattan. Therapist Grace Reinhart Sachs is about to embark on a publicity blitz to promote her buzzed-about book on why relationships fail, You Should Have Known. In the meantime, she cares for her 12-year-old son, Henry, who attends the same private school she went to as a child. Grace also treasures her loving relationship with her longtime husband Jonathan, a pediatric cancer doctor at a prestigious hospital. The novel's first third offers readers an authoritative glimpse into the busy-but-leisurely lives of private-school moms. Grace does her best to get along with the school's vapid and catty fundraising committee. She eventually learns that one of the mothers outside her social strata, Malaga Alves, was found murdered in her apartment by her young son. Grace, already tense and sad from these events, becomes more and more anxious as Jonathan, at a medical conference in the Midwest, proves unreachable over several days. The author deftly places the reader in Grace's shoes by exploring her isolation, unease, and contempt for the rumor mill. The plot borders on hyperbole when it comes to upending what we know about one character, but that doesn't take much away from this intriguing and beautiful book. Agent: Suzanne Gluck, WME Entertainment. (Mar. 2014) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
New York native Grace Sachs is a therapist with a self-help book in the offing, based on her successful practice in which she delivers tough love to wives with unfixable mates. "You should have known" is her mantra: that he would cheat; that he was a compulsive liar; that the sexual fooling around in college with another guy wasn't just a one-off. Grace's own life is exemplary: she's happily married to a doctor, Jonathan, who tirelessly heals sick kids; their son, Henry, attends private school and plays the violin. "Sometimes I look at you and I think, 'Well, she never would have fallen for this'," complains one of her clients. "Here I sit, your, like, target moronic reader." But Grace is, of course, headed for a fall. In the early passages, where Grace is still blithely living in her privileged bubble, Korelitz writes deftly and drily about middle-class New York life. Their formerly modest area has gone upscale; Henry mixes with the children of the super-wealthy, and though Grace and Jonathan are comparatively well off they can't compete with hedge-fund mothers who possess Birkin bags in every colour (Grace has only one). An innocuous moment of social unease is the cue for catastrophe. At a meeting of the school fundraising committee, Malaga Alves, the little-known mother of one of the school's few Hispanic children, arrives with her small baby. Although no men are present, she evokes widespread disgust when she proceeds to breastfeed, calmly exposing both breasts long after the baby is sated. "It was just bizarre," fumes one mother, "sitting there like that." "Could be cultural," Grace observes. At the fundraiser itself, Malaga causes more disquiet with her smouldering sexuality. A train of events is set in motion that will lead Grace to question everything she ever assumed about her saintly husband. Whether the title of Grace's own book (and this novel) applies to her is the central question. If Grace "should have known", then she is either a smug hypocrite or a fool, but if she could not have detected a level of sociopathy so deep it evades even gut instinct, then the premise of her book is bogus. Which way is Korelitz going to go? There are a few possible clues to something odd about Jonathan, but as we see everything through Grace's eyes, it is hard to judge whether or not she is deluding herself. It is a clever novel, predicated on the idea of storytelling itself - what has Grace been doing but spinning a plausible tale and delivering it flawlessly? However, the tension is dissipated with overly literary passages such as a lengthy description of the provenance of Grace's family's country property and tortuous evocations of her state of mind. She also rarely does things that would be obvious to most people, such as switching on the TV to follow the progress of a crime story, or asking detectives and co-workers basic questions. Korelitz evidently considers her heroine to be deserving of some final hope amid the ruins, but that is no excuse for the lakeful of schmaltz we wade through at the end. Having unleashed the strangeness of Jonathan, it is a shame Korelitz felt the need to resolve her bleak and unsettling story into something much more trite. To order You Should Have Known for pounds 10.39 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - Suzi Feay Grace's own life is exemplary: she's happily married to a doctor, Jonathan, who tirelessly heals sick kids; their son, Henry, attends private school and plays the violin. "Sometimes I look at you and I think, 'Well, she never would have fallen for this'," complains one of her clients. "Here I sit, your, like, target moronic reader." But Grace is, of course, headed for a fall. An innocuous moment of social unease is the cue for catastrophe. At a meeting of the school fundraising committee, Malaga Alves, the little-known mother of one of the school's few Hispanic children, arrives with her small baby. Although no men are present, she evokes widespread disgust when she proceeds to breastfeed, calmly exposing both breasts long after the baby is sated. "It was just bizarre," fumes one mother, "sitting there like that." "Could be cultural," Grace observes. At the fundraiser itself, Malaga causes more disquiet with her smouldering sexuality. A train of events is set in motion that will lead Grace to question everything she ever assumed about her saintly husband. - Suzi Feay.
Kirkus Review
Jason Bourne meets Martha Stewart in another of Korelitz's woman-of-a-certain-age-in-crisis dramas. The author's 2009 novel, Admission, is now a film starring Tina Fey. Well, not quite Jason Bourne. But Grace Reinhart Sachs is almost as resourceful. She lives the perfect life--or so she thinks--with a rich, famous doctor for a husband and a satisfying if hurried professional life as a therapist, pop psychologist and now author of a book called, yes, You Should Have Known, a book that's "apparently about to snag the Zeitgeist." With said snagging comes her ascent to public personhood, or, as Grace puts it in psychologese, "[t]hus completing my public infantilization." Her book urges women to take charge and exercise due diligence with regard to potential life mates, though in her own case, she had "absolutely just known, the first time she had lain eyes on Jonathan Sachs, that she would marry and love him for the rest of her life." Mistake. Karma being what it is, it only stands to reason that the perfection of her life--the great kid, happy marriage, stunningly appointed city apartment and country home--will fall apart at the mere hint of scandal. And so it does, so that when Grace discovers that he's not everything that he's cracked up to be--emphasis on cracked up--she swings into action to uncover every dirty bit of laundry that's hidden in that oak-paneled walk-in closet. Sachs writes with clarity and an unusual sense of completeness; she doesn't overdescribe, but neither does she let much of anything go by without observing it, which slows an already deliberately paced narrative. She is also an ascended master of the psychologically fraught situation, of which Grace experiences many as she stumbles on but then rises above the wreckage of her life. A smart, leisurely study of midlife angst.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
There is an exquisite but excruciating irony in the fact that Grace's marriage is imploding. The successful Manhattan couples therapist is just about to start the PR blitz for her first book, one that examines the tell-tale, he's not right for you signs that, caught early enough, can prevent shaky relationships from becoming emotional earthquakes. Mired in the media whirlwind while working on a fundraiser for her son's tony private school, Grace is only peripherally aware that her husband, charismatic pediatric oncologist Jonathan, is characteristically but frustratingly incommunicado. Then when one of her committee associates is found brutally murdered the same time Jonathan drops off the radar screen, Grace slowly learns that everything she thought she knew about the man she married is blatantly false. Like peeling back the layers of an onion, Korelitz's stinging deconstruction of this marital facade simultaneously reveals the inexorable lies about Grace's supposedly ideal mate. Sensitively delving into the intricacies of self-deception, Korelitz (The White Rose, 2005) delivers a smart and unsettling psychological drama.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE FIRST HALF of Jean Hanff Korelitz's novel about a New York therapist is less than revelatory, although that turns out to be for excellent reason. Grace Reinhart Sachs, an affluent Upper East Side mother with a thriving couples practice, frets almost genetically about such privileged concerns as how much to push her son to continue with his violin lessons. She offers loving descriptions of an ideal husband - a pediatric oncologist - who somehow never gels into either a recognizable type or an intriguingly unique character. The absence of key friends and family members feels underexplained. It doesn't take long, however, for the reader to realize that these structural weaknesses are, in fact, intentional blurrings - vague, unsatisfying details seen from the perspective of an unreliable central character, a woman unable to look too closely at the sharp edges in her cashmere-cloaked life. Grace has always been fascinated by the power of denial, but she misinterprets her preoccupation as professional, not personal. As the novel opens, she is about to publish a book, called "You Should Have Known," exhorting women to stop constructing elaborate stories that justify the failings of the flawed men in their lives and to move on to more deserving partners. Interviewed by a writer for Vogue, Grace lays out the extent of women's blindness in the face of romantic hope: "He could be holding up a placard that says I will take your money, make passes at your girlfriends, and leave you consistently bereft of love and support, and we'll find a way to forget that we ever knew that. We'll find a way to unknow that." It's a given that Grace, as the happily married expert, isn't actually a part of that "we," but within days of uttering those words she learns that the mother of a schoolmate of Grace's son has been murdered, and that her own husband, supposedly off at an oncology conference in Cleveland, has suddenly become unreachable. Grace experiences these two events as distressing but wholly unrelated, intelligently finding ways to unknow the significance of details whose meaning must be apparent to the reader - her husband's cellphone, left behind; the persistent police interest in his whereabouts. It takes an accumulation of worrisome, undeniable new facts to topple the nest of comfortable illusions she has worked so hard to gather. Dramatic irony isn't the only pleasure of "You Should Have Known"; Grace's husband's pathology is erratic enough for behavior that holds genuine surprise. But the real suspense here lies in wondering when Grace will catch up to the reader. When and how will she come to know what she should have known and at some level maybe already did? The momentum of the novel, not to mention the writing, takes off just as Grace starts stumbling her way, arms outstretched, toward a glimpse of her husband's true nature. Reasonably astute about the subtle class distinctions and self-justifications of the moneyed world Grace inhabits, Korelitz writes with far more originality and energy when boring down into the mechanisms of denial. That phenomenon is the terrible mystery she seems most interested in solving. "And then in a location so deep inside her that she had not known of its existence," she writes of a moment of insight for Grace, "something heavy and metallic chose this moment to creak the tiniest bit open, with a grating of rust and the release of a new terrible thought: that everything rising around her was about to converge." Korelitz manages to pull off the contrivance that Grace, having written an entire book about blind spots, could be so spectacularly sabotaged by her own: The advice book is understood as the clanging of an alarm, the product of Grace's own subconscious raging to be heard. In contrast, the novel's resolution feels surprisingly neat and tidy for a story about the messiness of the mind. In fiction, some details, the ones that tug almost imperceptibly at the reader's subconscious, set the stage for an unexpected but inevitable truth; others merely make too obvious what will happen next. In "You Should Have Known," both varieties show up in the service of a story that holds the soothing promise - despite all evidence to the contrary - of a happy-enough ending. SUSAN DOMINUS is a staff writer at The Times Magazine.
Library Journal Review
In Korelitz's (Admission) latest novel, psychotherapist Grace Reinhart Sachs's soon-to-be-published relationship guide, You Should Have Known, turns out to have an unintentionally ironic title when shocking revelations come to light about her own husband, Jonathan. Grace, who has always considered herself to be happily married and a keen observer of human behavior, learns firsthand how it feels to have people stand in judgment of her personal and professional instincts. The very public implosion of her marriage forces Grace to flee Manhattan with her preteen son and reevaluate everything that she believed about herself as a person, wife, and psychotherapist. In addition to creating an engaging character study, Korelitz offers a tantalizing peek into the world of moneyed Manhattanites and exclusive New York City private schools. Narrator Christina Delaine deftly handles the characters' various accents, genders, and ages and recounts the story in a warm tone, as if relating the tale to a close friend. Verdict This well-crafted novel of suspense is recommended for fans of Gillian Flynn's work.-Nicole Williams, Rochelle Park Lib., NJ (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.