A Review of Araminta Hall’s “Imperfect Women”
An Imperfect Novel
Araminta Hall has established herself as a master of the domestic thriller. Her previous novel, Our Kind of Cruelty, was a gripping page-turner — though one that would deliberately make you uncomfortable as you read it. That book was about a stalker trying to win back the affections of an ex-girlfriend who had moved on, and it was the type of book that you needed to take a bath after reading. It was greasy and slick, and utterly revolting — but in a largely good way. It was entertaining. Well, with Hall’s new book, Imperfect Women, you get another kitchen sink domestic crisis in book form. The scope for Hall is much bigger with this book, and she turns down the temperature of the thriller aspect of the book to paint on a bigger canvas with more major characters in it. It’s a murder mystery, but the emphasis is a little less on the whodunnit and more about how it happened and what lead up to it.
The novel is told from the vantage points of three different middle-aged British women, all of whom are friends with each other and have been since their university days. First, there’s Eleanor, who is single and works with a human rights charity. Then, there’s Nancy — a novel translator who is married to Robert and has a daughter, Zora — and has a seemingly perfect marriage. Finally, there’s Mary, who is in a somewhat abusive relationship with her husband and is saddled with three children — she is a stay-at-home mother. At the novel’s outset, Nancy winds up dead, a possible homicide victim. Suspects include everyone from Robert to one of her clients who shares virtually the same first name as the person Nancy has told Eleanor she’s been seeing before her death.
What makes Imperfect Women fascinating is that, in Hall’s hands, you’ll never be sure who the murder suspect really is. At one moment, it could be Person A and the next, Person B. However, Imperfect Women is less of a police procedural — which it sort of starts out being a little bit — and more of an examination of each of these women’s lives; in other words, a recounting of how they ended up in their predicaments and relationships over time. There’s a great deal of backstory in Imperfect Women, so much so that it threatens to capsize the entire book! Maybe women will find the “how X relationship came to be” fascinating, but for this (male) reader, the exercise was one of boredom. Imperfect Women is nowhere near as gripping as Our Kind of Cruelty, though I think I know where Hall was going with this one.
Hall has something to say with this novel about attitudes towards women and their role in domesticity in the current climate. It is, in some ways, a feminist text — trying to show that women can have their career or marriage and eat it too, and, if not, they can support each other and become better at treating each other well. That’s laudable and an important thing to say. However, throughtout an entire novel, this tact soon becomes taxing and tiring, as though Hall is beating the same horse repeatedly. I thought as I read Imperfect Women that this might be the type of book that would have worked much better as a novella for that reason. Additionally, there’s certainly not much need for all of the flashbacks to better days, or letters exchanged between lovers and spouses. There’s a lot of dead weight in Imperfect Women, and that makes it hard to read and hard to recommend.
All of that said, I do have to concede that Hall did keep me on my toes when the murder mystery parts of the book kicked into gear. You will never guess who the murderer truly is, or if it was murder in its strictest sense after all. If only this book were a bit shorter and focused on the murder mystery aspects instead of shooting so high, it would have been tighter and much more enjoyable. What you get is some thrills with Imperfect Women, and an awful lot of boring bits that will make your eyes glaze over from the sheer repetitious nature of them. Yes, we know that one of the husbands is a cad, and yes we know that another husband suspected his wife of cheating on him. No need to belabour these points.
Even though Imperfect Women generally lands with a soft thud, I wouldn’t give up on Hall just quite yet. While her experiments into social commentary are a bit of a failure this time out, she can — when she wills it — write a compelling and fascinating tale with flawed characters who are generally likable. While Our Kind of Cruelty was not a perfect book, either, it proved that Hall could write an edge-of-your-seat thriller, and Imperfect Women is an attempt to dial down some of the heat of the previous book into something more temperate. While it is not always successful, there’s enough here to keep readers generally interested (if they skim over the yawn-inducing bits), though if they’re new to Hall, I would start them with Our Kind of Cruelty first. I was excited for Imperfect Women after Our Kind of Cruelty, but even if this book left me more than a little cold, there are glimmers of suspense even in Hall’s failure to expand the scope of her storytelling. With just a little more honing, and pruning back some of the ordinariness of her writing, Hall is bound to have a real winner, a real masterpiece to come out of her pen sometime soon.
Araminta Hall’s Imperfect Women will be published by MCD on August 4, 2020.
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You may also be interested in the following review: Araminta Hall’s Our Kind of Cruelty.
Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
