This review contains major spoilers.
What makes a good thriller book? Is it a gripping plot? The characters? A unique premise? Or the ending? Can one element single-handedly break an entire thriller?
These are all questions I’ve asked myself after reading Alex Michaelides’s “The Silent Patient,” and I’ve found that you can’t afford to neglect your twists in a genre defined by them.
“The Silent Patient” is perhaps one of the most popular thriller novels, written in 2019 and appearing on most if not all thriller book lists you find on the internet. The book centers on Theo Faber, a psychotherapist who transfers to “The Grove,” a small psychiatric facility in London teetering on the edge of closure, in hopes of understanding Alicia Berenson, a woman who killed her husband six years ago and has never spoken since, her only message the “Alcestis”—a cryptic self-portrait of herself in front of an easel and canvas after the murder, her paintbrush “dripping red paint—or is it blood?”
“The Silent Patient” compelled me to read from the exposition all the way to the final twist at the end of the book in a single sitting. Unfortunately, this twist turned out to be so profoundly disappointing it ruined the rest of the book for me.
“The Silent Patient” makes use of the “unreliable narrator” trope, where the main character is either shown or revealed to be misleading the reader either unintentionally or on purpose—the latter in Theo’s case. Though I am usually fond of unreliable narrators, it does not work well in “The Silent Patient.” Many of the events leading up to the twist feel nearly meaningless by the end of the book.
Throughout most of “The Silent Patient,” Theo tries to do three things: become Alicia Berenson’s psychotherapist (which he achieves relatively early in the book) get Alicia to communicate with him and unravel her mysterious psyche, and learn more about Alicia through the people who knew her, all of which would help him get her to talk to him and finally reveal the reason she shot her husband. As the book progresses, Theo succeeds in getting Alicia to create a painting, which features the Grove alflame with two people on the fire escape, and Theo says: “I recognized the man as myself. I was carrying Alicia in my arms, holding her aloft while the fire licked at my ankles. I couldn’t tell if I was depicted as rescuing Alicia—or about to throw her in the flames.”
Later, Theo makes a major breakthrough: Alicia gives him her diary, where she has documented her life leading up to the murder. From here, Theo investigates the people she mentions in it to learn more about who she was before the murder. These people include Max Berenson, Alicia’s brother-in-law, and Paul Rose, her cousin. In the last fourth of the book, Alicia finally speaks. The next day, Alicia explains to Theo what happened the night of the murder: it was a masked intruder, not her, who killed her husband. But Theo recognizes her story as a lie.
The book also has a second storyline which runs alongside the main plot. This storyline is focused on Theo Faber’s personal life, where he finds out that his wife Kathy is cheating on him through a thread of dirty emails with another man. Shortly after Theo finishes reading Alicia’s diary in the main plot, he follows Kathy in the second storyline and sees the man his wife is cheating with for the first time. After witnessing them together, he continues to secretly follow Kathy, and tails the man as he returns home after another one of their trysts. This way, he finds out that the man has a wife at home he too had betrayed. The next several days, Theo repeatedly returns to the man’s home, stalking the wife and planning how to reveal the cheating to her.
The twist of the book relies on an assumption by the reader that the two storylines take place at the same time. But this second storyline was in fact set in the past, and the man Theo’s wife was cheating with and his wife were none other Gabriel and Alicia Berenson. During the climax in the last 20 pages of the book, the last entry of Alicia’s diary recounts the night of the murder. Theo breaks into their home, knocks Gabriel out and restrains both of them. Theo tells Alicia he will kill Gabriel and she pleads for his life, and he forcefully wakes Gabriel and tells him to decide who he wants Theo to kill: him or Alicia. Gabriel hushedly answers, “I don’t want to die.” In response, Theo aims the gun at Alicia, making Gabriel beg him to shoot, but then shoots the ceiling instead. Theo then unties Alicia and leaves. The now silent Alicia picks up the gun and shoots Gabriel. In the diary entry, Alicia also reveals that she’d thought she recognized Theo from that day all along, but his reaction to her fabricated story was what told her she had to be correct.
My issue with this twist is that once the motive for Alicia’s murder is revealed, Theo’s investigations lose any relevance to the plot. Through the investigations, Theo learns that Max was jealous of Gabriel and tried to take her from him; Paul reveals that he grew up with Alicia after her father died by suicide, and her aunt Lydia Rose blamed her for his death. Besides this, nothing more comes from their addition to the story. Many of the other characters have a similar issue of feeling like they exist solely to act as a red herring or plot device. For example, Christian West, a psychologist at The Grove is antagonistic towards Theo and is revealed to have previously treated Gabriel before his death. But besides criticizing Theo’s every move and making his lack of faith in The Grove’s patients clear, the reader gets little other indicators of his personality. It feels like Michaelides did not put much thought into Christian’s character other than making him an obstacle in Theo’s way and a possible suspect at fault for Gabriel’s murder.
Theo’s investigations could be explained by an obsessive desire to “fix” Alicia and justify himself as a hero of her story. But the twist never gives a satisfying explanation for Alicia’s silence. When Alicia speaks to Theo for the first time, she says that her silence all those years was because “it seemed pointless … there was nothing to say.” While I was reading, I’d assumed that this was not the full reason, and the real reason for her silence would be shown later in the story. But a better reason is never given. Considering that Alicia’s silence was one of the main mysteries of the story from the start, it makes finishing the book feel pointless.
Overall, Michaelides does a poor job of fleshing out and justifying his twist. Although his book has an interesting premise with a lot of potential, it goes to waste because of a twist and an ending that fails to give a satisfactory answer to some of the main questions that initially pull readers in. But even not considering the book’s disappointing twist, Michaelides fails to flesh out any characters other than Theo and Alicia. So much of a thriller revolves around the characters and the twist and so thriller book cannot afford to fail to properly develop them as “The Silent Patient” does. This means that even though “The Silent Patient” does a good job at pulling in and hooking its readers, it ultimately is not a book worth reading to the end.
