Review: Looker
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4 stars. I feel so lucky that I can, in this day and age, read extensively about complicated, layered, real women. Women who are capable of good and evil. Successful women with problems, women who are fulfilled in different ways, strong, stubborn, obsessive, struggling, sexual women who fuck up and buck up and own the fact that being a women means being a fighter. Women who are large and loud and present.
Yes, we still have a long way to go, particularly in featuring women of color and other diverse voices. But I'm thrilled to see so many artists explore what it means to be female, especially under the surface. I particularly enjoy authors like Gillian Flynn, Madeline Miller, and Ottessa Moshfegh, who poke and scrape and peek under the blanket, pulling at the knots, giving even the most grotesque and dangerous of us a pointed spotlight.
More of that, please. I really do eat it up. But when so many artists - starved to be heard - jump on the train, that train gets crowded. And common elements emerge. Trends. And suddenly what once felt new and fresh feels derivative and stale. Things start sounding familiar.
A depressed, spiraling, recently-separated, wine-guzzling, self-loathing, utterly judgmental female becomes obsessed with someone. Another female, perhaps. Becomes tangled up in a crime. She is unlikeable, and an unreliable narrator. The Girl on the Train. The Woman in the Window. Notes on a Scandal. Even Sharp Objects. And now, Looker.
AND IT'S AWESOME! I loved it. Yes, it feels familiar - in the BEST WAYS. This is a succinct pageturner that takes you into the mind of a middle-aged college professor, recently separated, who becomes infatuated with an actress who lives down the street. Yes, she guzzles wine, she's full of self-loathing, she swings between envy and anger, she's hypercritical of others - all characteristics we see frequently in these types of books. But Laura Sims manages to keep things moving in a sharp and witty way, placing you right in the terrifying headspace of someone suffering a nervous breakdown.
I think what's so terrifying about this is we can all relate to our unnamed narrator, in small ways. Her outlook overlaps ours. I think many of us have experienced a bizarre sense of entitlement when it comes to celebrities we admire. Her struggles with infertility sound absolutely brutal and serve as a fascinating explanation (not excuse) for her descent into madness. I liked the tight focus and the level of detail, despite it being so short. I liked the poetry. And I loved the ending.
I would argue that this isn't solely about the obsession with the actress, so don't go in expecting that. It's about a variety of factors and circumstances, internal and external, contributing to one flawed woman's breakdown. Her sense of justification was twisted but very human. I was glued to the pages as she slowly lost her grip on reality. I almost rooted for her. I almost rooted for her to go for it, to cross the line. Looker provided a really weird, and really fun, reading experience - a true, in my opinion, psychological thriller.