I love it when books lie to me.

*Spoilers for The Wife Between Us lie below*

I love it when a book lies to me. There’s something about a suspicious or unreliable narrator that really gets me to devour a novel. That being said, my favorite narrator at this moment (because we all know favorite books and narrators change as soon as you read the next “great” book) is Vanessa from The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen.

In this psychological thriller, an angry ex-wife stalks her ex-husband’ss young fiancée. The story unfolds through multiple viewpoints...or so it seems. In Vanessa’s chapters, the narrator is homodiegetic and intradiegetic. Vanessa narrates in first-person as a character of the story. In Nellie’s chapters, the narrator is heterodiegetic and intradiegetic. This puts some distance between the reader and Nellie’s experiences. It is not until part two of the novel that the reader discovers that Vanessa is Nellie (Nellie was the nickname her ex-husband called her) and the woman Vanessa is stalking is named Emma. Therefore, the chapters in which we have an “unknown” narrator, are actually narrated by Vanessa herself. She is telling the readers about her past but the authors have written it to mislead the audience.

Vanessa is clearly unhinged, but she’s been through a lot so the reader ends up rooting for her. At least I did. According to Per Krogh Hansen’s four types of unreliability, Vanessa is an intertextual unreliable narrator. This means the unreliability is based off the character’s identity more than the narrator’s discourse. Since Vanessa is an emotional drunk at this point in her life, the reader can assume that her narration is, at least a little, skewed.

I found it very clever that the novel went from seeming to have two narrators to only having one. It was a trick performed beautifully by Hendricks and Pekkanen. It provided the novel with so many layers to work through during the first half of the book and after, once the veil of deceit was lifted.

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ENG 6283: Narrative Theory

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