Helpless by Jessica Knoll

Jessica Knoll writes her heroines for the female gaze. They might have to summon cunning and resilience in the face of mortal danger, as in her superb last novel, Bright Young Women, which accurately reframes Ted Bundy in a pathetic light and places the attention on his victims and survivors. Knoll’s star-making debut, Luckiest Girl Alive, has the protagonist self-reinventing to escape the shadow of a high school sexual assault.

Knoll’s titillating new release, Helpless, observes this tradition by placing its central figure, successful actor-writer-director Faye Heron, in the path of orchestrated male violence after she returns from Los Angeles to her old college campus in upstate New York for the funeral of her former professor and mentor.

The first act of Helpless is, among many other good things, a masterclass in bait-and-switching. We meet the cast, including Faye’s old friend Campbell, one of the few people she is in touch with from that era, who is described as a figure so blond and square-jawed he could be out of Central Casting. Campbell has a wife, Corrine, who conspicuously dislikes Faye. Everyone is enmeshed, tied together by years of history and even blood bonds: Campbell is the nephew of the dead prof, known as PT, and the cousin of Faye’s ex-boyfriend, Henry Spalding.

With the introduction of handsome, well-to-do Henry, who is from one of the wealthy families that owns property in the exclusive enclave around the Finger Lakes – these are people who observe their own class system, who prefer to holiday like they’re camping, with only partial access to electricity and plenty of outdoor recreation; much of the action of the novel takes place around several of these spartan properties – Knoll executes the first of the novel’s many tricks.

I won’t give any away here, except to say that although I’ve seen this novel pitched as an “erotic thriller” – the term is even used in a meta manner in the text itself – as Faye and Henry, now in their 30s, are presented with the opportunity to revisit a college-era relationship that was characterised by an intense physical connection. (There is the strong insinuation that it wasn’t a healthy connection, with Campbell assuring Faye that Henry is “a totally different person now”, but Faye is sure the past isn’t past: “It didn’t matter that Henry and I were both married to other people now. We had shattered each other.”)

But erotically speaking, there is a lot more, and more sinister, going on than just sex or even infidelity, the latter of which is probably de rigueur for such an insulated, elevated group of people. For it’s a neat little feint by Knoll to reunite the two so suggestively while they are in rocky unions – Henry’s wife is seen only in glimpses and never given a name, and Faye is considering leaving her husband and creative partner, also unnamed, over a secret he has: “Not the one you’re thinking, the normal one that normal husbands sometimes have.” Whatever could his sin be?

The novel doesn’t return to Faye’s not-normal husband for some time, and when it does, we see how the golden handcuffs of her professional life have been polished and tightened, and how much control over the pair is exerted by her husband’s brother, a “crude and money-obsessed and vengeful” Hollywood super-agent. Like every other character, Faye’s high-status lifestyle is enviable only from a distance.

Helpless reminded me of a similarly intoxicating novel of the past few years, Emma Cline’s The Guest, which likewise is set among the rich and removed and features a protagonist who is as mesmerising as she is hard to grasp; is she orchestrating events or are they simply happening to her, an unwitting participant?

Certainly, Helpless is the kind of novel that has the reader transfixed from the opening scene; not a sentence or a line of dialogue is errant or wasted. I only put it down at times because I wanted to delay reaching the end, to stay inside Knoll’s ultra-twisty mystery. Thrillers don’t come freakier or more fun than this.

Reviewer: Stephanie Jones

Simon & Schuster