Book Review: The Complicities

Nonfiction guide by Stacey D’Erasmo, published 2023

304 pages

An Emotionally Fraught Tale Asking What it Means to be Complicit

Sometimes, I walk into my town’s public library and beeline straight for the new release shelf. From there I grab a book solely from its cover art - I like the idea of not always being directed by reviews or new release hype via my Goodreads emails, but rather by my own visual aesthetic. Oftentimes, this tactic will introduce me to a new author that I absolutely love and occasionally, I end up with a book that I really couldn’t get into. This is how I ended up choosing D’Erasmo’s book The Complicities.

Set in small town Massachusetts, main character Suzanne is middle-aged, recently divorced and trying to establish a new life for herself. Her divorce was the result of her husband going to jail for financial crimes against numerous individuals (think a low-key Bernie Madoff), and while she never comes out and explicitly tells you that she feels guilt or shame towards what happened, it’s clear to you that these circumstances are never far from her mind. Her narration cannot ever fully be trusted, as D’Erasmo forces you to read between the lines of Suzanne’s very controlled voice. It’s made clear that Suzanne continues to feed herself these ideas, “You have to know to be truly complicit, and I didn’t,” she insists. “I was busy taking care of our family” to assuage herself of any true complicity she had during her marriage to Alan.

The intriguing question of complicity is paramount to Suzanne’s actions and thoughts, and is the key thread throughout the entire story. What does it mean to be truly complicit? Should guilt by association be something worth battling, when you aren’t the one who actually did the dirty deed?

As she is busy building her new life, a whale accidentally gets beached in her small town. This whale, who’s clearly in great distress, becomes almost how Suzanne sees her salvation. If she can aid the whale by joining the volunteer team to save it; if she can donate to the organization that’s planning the rescue; if she can see her life through a new lens to get over her “great misfortune” than maybe, just maybe, she can be freed of any guilt that she harbors.

Once you get into the second section though, there’s a bit of an abrupt turn in narration. Suzanne still narrates some, but her time is now split between Lydia (Alan’s second wife), and Sylvia (Alan’s mom). Lydia is a now-sober burn victim, who carries pretty heavy physical and emotional baggage. Sylvia is a woman who gave up custody of her son decades prior, who yearns to reconnect with him and his family. Each woman orbits around Alan in their own way, and as such, are strangely connected to one another. They all offer entirely different perspectives of him, and in the end, become individually complicit to his misdeeds.

2.5 out of 5 Stars

While I actually finished this book in just under 2 days, it was a bit of an internal struggle to do so. More of a “I should hurry up and get through it since I chose to start it” rather than a “holy shit this is amazing and I literally cannot focus on nothing but this storyline.”

This isn’t to say that the story was poorly written or that it wasn’t intriguing in places. For me though, the narration became a bit messy when flipping between the three voices with nothing more than a page break, and overall, the plot simply wasn’t particularly compelling. I continued to find myself bored and had to bring my eyes back to the pages. All in all, it just wasn’t my cup of tea.