Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid

Am very late to the party on The Housemaid.

I started this novel three times before I finally pushed through to the end, so my experience is clearly a bit different than the legions of fans who rave about it online. On GoodReads there are more than three million ratings and 274,000 some reviews.

So it’s fair to say that no one is waiting with bated breath for yet one more review.

But I have a few thoughts, nonetheless:

This is a short, relatively choppy book, written in very basic prose. The voices of the two protagonists are not very differentiated, which becomes a problem in the second part of the novel.

The plot makes no sense.

The twist is predictable.

The characters are not believable and the villain, in particular, needs much more development.

Oh, and the gender politics are making me think of Gone Girl.

Worse, the gender politics are making me miss Gillian Flynn’s novel, because what one of the characters in this novel plots to do is arguably worse than frame a cheating spouse for murder, although it works out.

There is now a film adaptation, and I took myself off to watch it, dutifully, even though the trailer gave an awful lot away–including the close resemblance of the two female leads, who are a decade or so apart in age but could otherwise pass as sisters.

The novel is about misogyny, but it also perpetrates misogyny, and that’s peculiar: we have blatant fat phobia, stereotyping of women with mental health issues, and an extremely superficial class critique that highlights only the harm done by oblivious privileged women. Structural inequities are not up for discussion.

The male lead is smouldering: I think he’s tall, dark, and handsome, but this is no Mr. Rochester. He’s a type, rather than a person. And the type is Jekyll and Hyde.

The film is an improvement, in significant ways. It’s not as much fun as the director’s A Simple Favour, which has some parallels to The Housemaid. But there’s some camp and a knowing/winking quality that isn’t present in the very earnest novel.

To summarize the plot a bit: our first narrator, Millie, is an ex-con desperate for a job and a place to live, so she jumps at the chance to be a live-in housemaid for a wealthy woman who’s too busy lunching and planning PTA events to look after her own home or daughter.

Nina, her new employer, is an enigma: sometimes she’s friendly and grateful, but more often she seems to be deliberately undermining and gaslighting Millie.

Nina is fifty pounds heavier than in her wedding photos, so of course Millie wonders how she’s holding onto her hot husband, who isn’t even the father of Nina’s bratty daughter.

Andrew, the husband, seems kind, reasonable, considerate, and accommodating–of both women.

And then very predictable things happen, and Millie, at the end of Part 1, has displaced Nina.

But not in a fun way, as in a Fay Weldon novel, where Nina would then plot her revenge against both of them.

It turns out this is all a plot. For those details, you will need to read the novel yourself–or, better, see the film.

Or just skip the whole thing and read/watch Gone Girl again, because it’s brilliantly constructed and the writing sings and when oh when will we get another terrific novel from Gillian Flynn?