Those Who Knew – Idra Novey

Penguin Books | Paperback | November 5, 2019

When a young woman named Maria P. turns up dead, Lena—a 30-something professor—immediately suspects Victor, a rising senator who's been organizing student rallies. While everyone else believes Victor to be charming, Lena has experienced his violent nature firsthand.

As usual, Idra Novey's prose is sharp and striking. However, while Those Who Knew starts with the promise of a taut political thriller, the narrative quickly goes slack. In doing so the novel shifts from a quest to expose Victor for the manipulative monster he is to a sort-of-slice-of-life story where Lena and the rest of Novey's quirky cast wrestle with all the things left unsaid and the regret of remaining silent in the face of injustice.

Rather than embrace this shift and it's slower pace Novey tries to keep the momentum rolling with bite-sized chapters and asides (e.g. journal entries, play scripts, newspaper articles, etc.). The structure is similar to that of Novey's debut novel, WAYS TO DISAPPEAR. But where the asides worked in her previous novel, in Those Who Knew they take away valuable page-time that could be spent diving deeper into the tangled web these characters inhabit.