quiet tenantby Clemence Michalon
Clemence Michalon’s definitive debut, The Quiet Tenant is a deftly paced psychological thriller about three female characters who are coerced and controlled in different ways by the same man.
The book begins with a mysterious figure called the “Woman in the Hut” who has been held captive and raped for the past five years by a young widow and single father, Aidan Thomas. A strong, reticent and exemplary citizen, he is popular in a small nameless town and always seems to show up when a hand of special skill is needed. But Aidan has two secrets. The fact that he renamed the cabin woman Rachel, and that he also murdered her eight other women for sport.
Rachel recently got some bad news. After the recent death of Aidan’s wife, her step-parents decided to sell her house where Rachel lives with her 13-year-old daughter Cecilia. Rachel thinks it means her end is near unless she tries to convince Aidan to take her too.
Miraculously, she does. Aidan moves Rachel into the bedroom next to Cecilia’s. Cecilia, who thought this woman was a friend of her unlucky father, noted that she didn’t see the handcuffs tying Rachel to the radiator for most of the day, and that Aidan had breakfast, dinner, and midnight. I don’t even notice that I’m unlocking only when I’m assaulted.
Over the years, Aidan has trained Rachel to participate in her own incarceration, but witnessing that assimilation becomes more and more painful. Why can’t Rachel tell Cecilia? Why doesn’t Rachel scream for help when she happens to run into other people in town, such as the judge who rents Aidan’s house? Why does Rachel seldom get his handcuffs off, so why doesn’t he just run for his life? The answer is simple, but it’s also tragic. Aidan tricked Rachel into believing he was omniscient. He told her that there were cameras watching her every move and that she would “know” if she tried to remove her tracking device that was fixed to her wrist. She believes that attempts at her freedom will only bring more harm.
Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel Room, also about a woman trapped in a hut by a rapist, is limited to the single-camera perspective of the woman’s five-year-old son in captivity. Michalon tells his story from multiple angles. that of Cecilia and that of a local bartender named Emily, who is in love with Aidan. Thanks to what we know from Rachel’s dissociated second-person chapter, the other characters’ first-person chapters instill more fear.
Seeing Aidan through the eyes of those who see him benevolently, sometimes lovingly, we sense the dangers of each relationship of this monster and the way people are blinded by it. Rather than rewarding romantic feelings, Emily justifies every red flag that suggests he might actually be chasing her (creepy heavy duffel bag, she plans to meet him). I found his truck hiding outside a bar that hadn’t been set up). And although Cecilia has lived under his control all her life, she has now lost her mother’s protective powers. Sprinkled throughout the film are voices recounting the final moments of the eight women Aidan murdered.
To the less capable, so many perspectives might have seemed cluttered and confusing. But Michallon cleverly utilizes this structure to build momentum towards a skeletal climax where his lines of three stories converge. She feels that even her decision to tell Rachel’s story in the second person is necessary. The “you” in captivity is not the same as the one who was once free.
Michalon makes it easy to believe that these three characters could be so detached from reality that they make frustratingly irrelevant choices. This book poses powerful questions to its readers. “What do we really know about the people around us, and how could we be making dangerous mistakes?”
Jacques Gemmuk is the most recent author of the novel Empty Theater.
quiet tenant | Clemence Michalon Page 303 | Alfred A. Knopp | $28
