A few weeks ago J. Robert Lennon published his latest novel, Hard Girls, with Mulholland Books, the crime imprint of Little, Brown and Company. Lennon has made his name as a writer of strange, unclassifiable fiction, and what is most peculiar about Hard Girls is how unpeculiar it is. It’s a very good mainstream book by an author who has never really been mainstream.
In a 2022 essay in the London Review of Books about a thriller by the French experimental novelist Hervé Le Tellier, Lennon tried to illuminate the distinction between “genre” writing and “literature” by suggesting that all novels are experiments within a set of constraints—it’s just that, in genre, the writer chooses to accept the constraints of the market. In the past, he has praised Kate Atkinson’s detective fiction and described The Likeness, the second book in Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series, as “one of [his] favorite novels of all time.” Lee Child blurbed his 2017 novel Broken River, and Lennon’s work often borrows genre tropes: a haunted house and ghostly presence here, an abandoned castle and uncanny forest there.
Still, in his nine previous novels (published by the artier Graywolf, based in Minneapolis), Lennon has flirted with genre but hasn’t gone all the way. Subdivision is a mystery of sorts yet it refuses to finish the narrative puzzles it sets up; the same goes for Familiar, which is more interested in clues than their solutions. Broken River opens with a gruesome murder followed by much amateur sleuthing. Its most memorable feature, however, is the Observer: “an invisible presence without corporeal substance” who haunts the action and allows Lennon to think about what draws us, irresistibly and maybe unethically, toward plot. Lennon’s novels read like less like Edgar Allan Poe than like the French Symbolists who were reading Poe. He has been brilliant at creating different kinds of fog: narrative, epistemological, metaphysical. Counter to genre’s expectations, though, the fog in Lennon’s work usually doesn’t burn away.
In Hard Girls, the slow burning, dread-filled atmospherics and self-reflexivity of Lennon’s previous work have been replaced by pace and propulsion. The novel opens at a gallop: “Nineteen years after she ran away from home, thirteen years after she married a stonemason, twelve years after her daughter was born, and eleven years after she got out of prison and pretended to put the past behind her,” Jane Pool receives an encrypted email from her twin sister, Lila, from whom she hasn’t heard in years. After decoding the message, which requires consulting an old copy of E. Nesbit’s children’s classic The Railway Children; after going to a pay phone, where she must enter a code and then wait for a call back, Jane hears her sister’s voice: “You have to come,” Lila says. “I think I’ve found her.” So ends the first chapter, with a flourish. This is a writer who knows how an airport-novel chapter should end, and he’s giving it to us straight.
“Her” is Jane and Lila’s mother, Anabel: a beautiful, distant woman who left for long stretches of their childhood (to visit family, Anabel claimed; to conduct “love affairs,” Jane and Lila now believe) before disappearing mysteriously for good over two decades ago. Lila, who was for years off the grid herself, has an offer: fly from upstate New York to an address in Missouri (“do not type [the address] into any computer or phone, ever,” Lila warns), buy a burner phone, and take a road trip to Montana, where the sisters will meet a guy who knows a guy who claims to know where their mother is.
This sounds enticing, to the reader if not immediately to Jane, who has a husband and daughter at home. But Jane never has felt at ease in her domestic life. This might have to do with her time spent in prison. (Her daughter doesn’t know about Jane’s stint behind bars and we don’t know for a while what brought her there, either.) Or her unease also might spring from a deeper, Anabel-like unfitness for familial life. “You think maybe you’re like her,” Lila says, knowing how to work her sister despite their years apart. “That something in you is broken, is dead, and you can’t love your husband right, and you can’t love your daughter right … So what you’re going to do is find her and confront her. You’re going to prove to yourself that you aren’t like her after all.” Jane can’t resist, and the hunt for Anabel is on.
The pulpy element only grows as the novel proceeds. We learn that the twins’ father, Harry, isn’t just a history professor but an informant for the intelligence services. Anabel might be involved with the cartels, or the CIA, or both. Lila is a skilled hacker; Jane is a skilled pickpocket; they con strangers, each other, and themselves. The humor can be silly and the prose a bit on the nose. “Jane felt like a child again, watching her mother disappear,” Lennon writes in the kind of explicatory sentence that doesn’t appear in his earlier work.
Is Hard Girls an excursion, or a change of direction? The book’s subtitle, “A Jane and Lila Pool Thriller,” might offer a clue. If publishers love anything more than a thriller, it’s a series. For years, Lennon has pushed against the market’s constraints. Now, he seems interested in working with them. Instead of examining our desire for narrative, he’s enjoyably, if less complicatedly, indulging it.
Anthony Domestico is an associate professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNY, and the book critic for Commonweal. He is the author of Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period. He has written for Book Post on Yiyun Li, Eleanor Catton, Marilynne Robinson, Sigrid Nunez, and Gary Snyder, among others.
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Ok. I’m solid on this book. Get me a copy.
I enjoyed reading this review, which brings this writer to my attention for the first time. He is prolific! Interesting that he has made this little swerve or what have you to something more arguably commercial. Though it can't be too surprising that he would do it if he could. I hope it sells like hot cakes for him!