Shadow Knows [Paperback]

This is one of the best books I've ever read. It has a tete-a-tete, intimate style (characteristic of many novels written by women from the '60s to the present). You feel as though you are talking to your best friend, who is telling in an informal way a fascinating story whose events are very bizarre and--and this is what makes this book brilliant--very familiar.

The protagonist speaks in the first person. It is the voice of a middle-class American housewife of the '60s. She is thoughtful and sensitive; she is perceptive; she is mild mannered--even a little self-effacing. She is a devoted and nurturing mother of several kids. She has a warm, gentle, bemused jenny-wren-like quality, not unlike many women we have known and loved.

She is recently divorced from her husband because they were emotionally incompatible.

Here's where the story starts to veer slightly to the left of center. The protagonist, although apparently middle class, is living in a public housing development, because divorce has left her in financial straits with several children to raise. And the character seems to become more anomalous when she starts getting death threats. She gets threatening telephone calls, finds dead animals placed on her car windshield, and threatening amulets in her mailbox. This gentle, mild-mannered, self-effacing, healthy, normal, and conscientious woman is being threatened with death.

For the rest of the novel, our heroine casts about in her thoughts, memories, and fantasies, with greater and greater intensity, to think of who might want to kill her.

And as she ponders this mystery, she puts together a longer and longer list of people who might like to kill her.

At this point, we begin to see the black humor peeping out of the structure of this novel, somewhat akin to ARSENIC AND OLD LACE. Femininity, daintiness, nurturance poised against death and violence.

And this is where the novel finally becomes most radical, most improbable, most bizarre. A wry, subtle humor becomes more and more apparent, as we realize that no matter how truly sweet, how mild mannered, how gentle, how nurturing this prototypical woman is, she still has a very long list of people who would like to kill her.

Diane Johnson makes us want to know who the culprit is, and at the same time she has us laughing and nodding in recognition--that women in general have many virulent enemies--even a woman of valor and sweetness; that the most stable, sane, and healthy people have bizarre currents running underneath their lives and threatening to engulf them.

And that, along with the author's brilliant writing style, is what endeared this book to me.

Diane Johnson writes with great sensitivity and skill about a divorced woman with four children, a lover, and ANGST. Her protagonist's interior monologues describe the paranoia engendered by the dislocations and unpredictability of modern life. About halfway through the novel, I found the themes too repetitious and I stopped caring. My ennui ultimately marred my appreciation for this well-written novel.

Meet N.

She may be your next-door neighbor or someone who lives down the block. Maybe she is a relative or just a person you happen to see when shopping at the local grocery store. N. has struggles on the rugged track of life - divorced mother, rocky finances, a relationship falling apart - but it's the shadows which lurk in the deepest regions of the soul that seem to be consuming her.

Author Diane Johnson takes the reader on a wild ride of raw emotions, quirky feelings and fears as N. tries to find love - and answers - in all the wrong places. She does a masterful job in developing N. and a wealth of supporting characters, with each one playing a believable role in a story that is rich in imagery and a plot that - like life - takes an unpredictable twist in the end.

And the consequences to shine a strong light on those shadows may be very chilling.

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