'Her' is a thrilling, chilling tale of two women
It's the most basic of parental nightmares: losing a child in the park. "It could have happened to anyone," says Emma, one of the two central women in Harriet Lane's mesmerizing, ultimately wrenching new thriller, Her.
Emma is trying to reassure herself, to make sense of the inconceivable horror that set in when she realized her 3-year-old son, Christopher, was missing, and abated 50 frantic minutes later, when she found him, sipping hot chocolate in a police station.
During that time period – at the beginning of it, notably – Christopher encountered the other woman in focus, Nina. His mother and Nina, both 40ish, had met before, after Emma lost her wallet while shopping and Nina managed to retrieve it and deliver it to Emma's North London home, conveniently close to her own. "It's mad, isn't it," Emma observes, while on the phone with Nina after Christopher's rescue. "That's twice you've basically saved my life."
By this point, less than halfway through Lane's novel, any discerning reader knows otherwise. Nina has been stalking Emma since the beginning, for reasons that remain unclear even as the author reveals vivid, haunting details of their very different lives, with the characters alternating as first-person narrators.
Nina, we learn, was an insecure child, the daughter of a self-absorbed, womanizing composer who essentially destroyed Nina's mother. But under the tutelage of her first husband – another narcissist, but apparently a more encouraging one – Nina blossomed into a coolly assured person, an artist in her own right, whose second spouse is similarly cultured but, by all appearances, a more decent chap.
Emma's present life, in contrast, appears to be one of perpetual frustration and disappointment. Before having Christopher, she worked in television; her husband, who still does, is a constant reminder of a more stimulating world that she feels increasingly disconnected from.
Emma loves Christopher, and his baby sister, Cecily, with whom she is pregnant in the early chapters, but dreads catching sight of her worn, disheveled reflection in the mirror, or considering what her life and prospects have, to her mind, been reduced to. She is too grateful for the elegant Nina's attention and affirmation to question it.
Nina's own experience with motherhood has, as it turns out, been less than idyllic. Daughter Sophie, from her first marriage, is now 17, clearly spoiled, and increasingly secretive from and scornful of her mom. "Sophie's face, I think, is like the moon, cold, mysterious, remote," Nina remarks at one point.
Lane's keen eye for the intricacies of female relationships — the confidences and competition that so often co-exist in them, for better and worse — extends to the mother-daughter bond, as complicated here as it is inextricable.
The final, heart-stopping sequence in Her juxtaposes a mother's love and fear (for a boy, in this case) with a daughter's displaced sense of betrayal and rage. What binds Nina and Emma in the end is desperation, a quality that pulses just beneath Lane's measured, nuanced writing until it slaps us – as it does Emma – in the face, leaving us breathless.
Her
By Harriet Lane
Little Brown, 261 pp.
3½ stars out of four