Something strange is afoot in mystery and suspense fiction. The plot of almost every thriller I’ve read in the past six months has had something to do with one character stealing the story of another character and passing it off as their own. The rundown includes: The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz, A Lonely Man by Chris Power, The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris, Palace of the Drowned by Christine Mangan, and A Slow Fire Burning, the forthcoming novel by Paula Hawkins of Girl on the Train fame.
Worry over manuscripts falling into the wrong hands is nothing new in mystery fiction; after all, Edgar Allan Poe, the acknowledged Father of the form, relied on that plot for his 1844 short story, “The Purloined Letter.” But this years’ crop of mystery and suspense novels puts a socially-conscious spin on the missing manuscript tale: they’re about the anxiety of appropriation, about one character in a position of privilege—in terms of gender, financial security, or race—laying their sticky mitts on the writing or life story of another character who’s not so advantaged.
The plot of Laura Lippman’s latest standalone suspense novel, Dream Girl, arises not only out of this anxiety about who gets to tell whose stories, but also out of the #MeToo movement. And, it also owes a lot to Stephen King’s 1987 horror classic, Misery, altogether making Dream Girl the ideal cutting-edge, socially-conscious entertainment for late summer.
Dream Girl is set in the penthouse of a lofty eyesore of a luxury high-rise in Baltimore, Lippman’s hometown and the site of most of her novels. We savvy readers sense that something is “off” from the opening description of famous novelist Gerry Andersen’s lavish digs. Lippman’s narrator tells us:
Gerry Andersen’s new apartment is a topsy-turvy affair—living area on the second floor, bedrooms below. The brochure—it is the kind of apartment that had its own brochure when it went on the market in 2018—boasted of 360-degree views, but that was pure hype. … Nothing means anything anymore, Gerry has decided. No one uses words correctly and if you call them on it, they claim that words are fungible, that it’s oppressive and prissy not to let words mean whatever the speaker wishes them to mean.
Isn’t this delicious? A cranky novelist ensconced in a swanky setting, railing at the idiocies of the contemporary world. As Lippman imagines him, Gerry owes something to Philip Roth (as well as to Roth’s fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman). There’s the brilliance, the wit, the complicated sexual history with women, and the fraught relationship with his own mother.
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