Moriarty really gets women: “you never changed your appearance for men, you changed it for other women, because they were the ones carefully tracking each other’s weight and skin tone along with their own; they were the ones trapped with you on the ridiculous appearance obsession merry-go-round that they couldn’t or wouldn’t get off.”
The main protagonist, romance writer Frances, bucks this trend by genuinely not giving a shit about her weight. Mother-of-four Carmel is, however, obsessed and shamed by her weight, believing it contributed to her ex-husband’s brutal dismissal of her as someone he didn’t find attractive any more (though it turns out her ex-husband was just a dickhead). Lottery winner Jessica has had her body and face surgically chiselled to Kardashian-esque perfection and doesn’t understand why her husband doesn’t love her more for it. Bereaved mother Heather uses exercise as a tool for outrunning her grief and guilt over her son’s suicide and her daughter Zoe has followed her lead. As Masha, the enigmatic leader of the health retreat they all attend, laments; “They nearly all loathed their bodies. Women and their bodies! The most abusive and toxic of relationships.”
Masha and her ten day health retreat in a grand, secluded house promise to transform the lives of these five women and the four men in the group. (I note at this point the novel is called Nine Perfect Stangers, though there is one couple and one family in the mix so technically they’re not all prefect strangers to one another, but let’s let that slide…) And they do get a kind of transformation, by unexpected and unpleasant means. I expected a murder at some point and was both relieved and mildly disappointed when Moriarty didn’t go down that particularly well-trodden path.
As always with Moriarty’s books, her female characters are better drawn than her male characters but she possesses an undeniable genius for nailing a character in a couple of short sentences, demonstrating the prejudices of those who are judging as well as see those being judged. On first encountering Tony by the roadside Frances notes he is “a very large, unpleasant, unkempt, unshaven man…probably one of those outback serial killers.” The ridiculously handsome Lars, a rich, pleasure-loving lawyer, later notes Heather’s husband is “adorably addled…, a long celery stick of a man, so dorky he was cool. His name was Napoleon, which just added to his marvellousness.” All of her characters get a decent backstory and though Masha’s feels contrived, some of them are genuinely affecting, like the horror and incomprehension of a son/brother’s suicide. The book does get a bit ridiculously dramatic and hysterical in the middle, though. You might, like me, feel almost like writing it off and then find yourself getting unexpectedly teary at the end.
There must be a lot for pressure on Moriarty to produce the next Big Little Lies. Unfortunately this isn’t it. Her best work, like Big Little Lies and What Alice Forgot, are about women who could be us (though with slightly bigger houses), going about their (slightly more dramatic) lives. This novel is far removed from that: it feels unrealistic in the middle and suffers from one too many happy endings.
Still worth a read though. There’s no writer quite like Liane.
