Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD on April 28, 2020
Take Me Apart is the story of two mentally ill women. Had Sara Sligar generated sympathy or created empathy for their plights, her concept might have been developed into a good book. Instead, Sligar offers too little reason to care about either woman while placing them in a contrived plot that never builds suspense.
Kate is an out-of-work copy editor who either quit or was forced out of her job after she reported sexual harassment (the truth of her departure from employment is concealed until the final third of the novel). Her aunt in Northern California recommends her services to Theo Brand, who wants an archivist to organize his mother’s papers.
Miranda Brand was a celebrated photographer whose mental health issues contributed to her fame. “Art is supposed to make you afraid,” she thinks, an emotion she hopes to evoke with photographs of blood-covered women. The circumstances of her death, when Theo was only eleven, triggered rumors that still persist in the community where Miranda lived.
Miranda was married to a painter named Jake whose art earned less money than Miranda’s. Both artists were represented by the same agent, who now hopes to cash in on photographs that Kate might find while sorting through Miranda’s stuff, as well as the archive of documents that Kate compiles.
We learn about Miranda at the end of each chapter. The chapters begin by recounting Kate’s archival work and her interaction with Theo and his two children. Chapters end with excerpts from the material Kate is organizing: Miranda’s diary entries, medical records, media clippings, and cryptic notes scribbled on the backs of photographs.
Kate begins to wonder whether Miranda really killed herself. It’s really none of her business, but to satisfy her curiosity, she snoops through Theo’s house and interviews Miranda’s agent and a law enforcement officer who investigated the death. Naturally, she begins to suspect that young Theo committed the crime, but only harbors that suspicion once she begins sleeping with him. The decision to sleep with Theo follows on the heels of a good bit of gush that would have been better suited to a cheesy romance novel.
Kate is emotionally fragile and off her OCD meds. She probably deserves the reader’s empathy, but Sligar didn’t make me care about her problems, many of which exist solely to give the book a plot. Kate makes every wrong decision it would be possible to make, has only herself to blame, and eventually comes to the realization (spoiler alert) that she should have stayed on her meds. Well, no kidding. I’m not sure what insight a reader is supposed to take from that.
Nor did I care about Miranda’s mental health issues, which are apparently meant to parallel Kate’s, but their disorders are quite different. Mirands suffered from a sort of postpartum depression that made her fantasize about killing Theo after his birth.
Both women are portrayed as having been victimized by men. It isn’t anyone’s fault but Kate’s that she stopped taking her meds. I would sympathize with her as a sexual harassment victim if that were the novel’s focus, but the focus is on Kate’s manic behavior, which can’t reasonably be attributed to sexual harassment that she handled quite capably and that ended as a result of her complaints. Jake sometimes had sex with Miranda when she wasn’t in the mood, but Miranda was always in a depressed mood, and it’s not clear that she ever communicated her lack of desire for sex to her husband. Her underlying problem, like Kate’s, is her mental illness, not abuse by a man.
Not that the men are ideal characters. Jake may have been insenstive to his wife, but he was married to a basket case. He mishandles a delicate situation involving his son which might account for why Theo is screwed up. This is an awfully dysfunctional and self-pitying cast of characters. The question is whether Sligar did anything with them that might be worthy of a reader’s time.
The only reason to keep reading about these self-absorbed misfits is the mystery surrounding Miranda’s death. Sligar dutifully sets up a few suspects, including Jake, Theo, the agent, and a character named Kid with whom Miranda had something more than a friendship. Miranda’s theories and suspicions about the death seem to be rooted in her mania rather than facts an objective observer might find persuasive. The idea of a nutcase accidentally unraveling a murder might make a good story, but this isn’t it. The eventual reveal about Miranda’s death is underwhelming. A late, out-of-nowhere effort to add a plot twist involving a disappearing diary induced a shrug of indifference.
Sligar’s prose style is polished. As a debut novel, Take Me Apart shows glimpses of promise. It just doesn’t deliver a plot or characters that made me care about the outcome. Fans of predictable and cheesy romance might appreciate the final chapter, but that chapter and the novel as a whole were too unconvincing to hold any appeal for me.
NOT RECOMMENDED