You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz: review

If your boyfriend thinks he’s smarter than you because he went to a better university than you did, comes home from parties plastered, lets you pay his credit card bill or confided he once had a thing with another guy, are these early warning signs that should put you off marrying him? Assuming you go ahead anyway, should you then be surprised when several years down the line you find that your husband, as he has now become, despises your intellect, is a full-blown alcoholic, has even bigger debts, or has come out and left you for another man? In other words, should you have known?

This is the premise for Jean Hanff Korelitz’s absorbing new novel, which is in many ways a superior example of the now popular psycho-thriller genre that Gillian Flynn pioneered with Gone Girl; the idea being that you can never really know the person closest to you.

Psychotherapist Grace Sachs, 39, is still happily married to paediatric oncologist Jonathan, with whom she has a 12 year-old son. They live on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and Grace, when not taking her son to and from his $38,000 a year, academically pushy school or even pushier violin lessons, listens to the sorry stories of women in miserable marriages. The publication of her first book — a self-help guide to choosing better relationships — is imminent. Its title is You Should Have Known, because that’s what Grace wants to say to these women.