Sculpting a novel that conveys vastness through inner lives alone is a tremendous challenge. Making that same novel a page-turning mystery that’s simultaneously moving and often nail-biting is another challenge altogether. With The Strange Case of Jane O., Karen Thompson Walker rises to meet both of these challenges head-on, and succeeds.
The title character is—externally at least—an unremarkable woman, a single mother who works at the New York Public Library. Alarmed by potential hallucinations, blackouts and a feeling of lingering sadness and dread, she seeks the help of a psychiatrist, who takes an interest not just in Jane’s case, but in the way the woman sees the world. Told through a combination of the psychiatrist’s reflections on his sessions with Jane, and Jane’s own diary entries addressed to her infant son, The Strange Case of Jane O. seeks to excavate a particular human mind in such a way that the minds of everyone around her, and the very nature of their reality, might turn on what becomes of this fascinating protagonist.
Though this engrossing book often moves with a thriller’s pace, there is little sensationalism in Walker’s writing. She approaches Jane’s story through spare, deliberate prose, keeping each chapter lean and, when narrating from the psychiatrist’s point of view, sometimes clinical. But it’s not cold prose. In fact, as the psychiatrist discovers the nature of Jane’s unique memory, her hallucinations and the source of her dread, the precision of Walker’s word choice becomes key to deciphering the mystery. This is not a book that holds the reader’s hand through every revelation, but one that asks something of us, wanting us to decipher along with its characters a mystery that is bigger than psychiatry, bigger than crime, bigger than a single strange incident.
Slowly, elegantly and with tremendous grace, Walker starts to draw parallels between therapist and patient, between mother and father, between woman and child, and The Strange Case of Jane O. becomes an emotional journey into the heart of what drives us, what breaks us and what keeps us walking the line of mundane daily life.
