The Girl on the Train

Trusting

I HAVE 2,391 “friends” on Facebook. People who don’t enjoy social networking snort derisively at the idea of anyone maintaining a connection to 2,391 people; they think it’s absurd that I would want to share snippets of my life with all these folk and would be interested to read about their likes and dislikes and their daily lives. With 2,391 Facebook friends, I couldn’t be less far from the madding crowd; I invite it into my life every time I check my smartphone or turn on my computer. But I enjoy it—I get recommendations for recipes; I see pictures of homes and vacations and children; I give and get suggestions on what items to buy and where to eat; I marvel at the cuteness of the animal world as revealed in countless adorable posts. If it weren’t for my Facebook friends, I never would have discovered the little Chinese girl who coos at animals in a hypnotic tone and, with voice and hand, can put into a sleeplike trance not just puppies and kittens but also chickens, rabbits, frogs, and lizards. It’s also through Facebook that I’ve learned about books that are now among my favorites and found links to articles that have changed and deepened my understanding of the world.

Obviously, most of the people sharing their clips and lives with me are not my friends in the traditional sense of the word. These are friendly acquaintances, and friends of friends. If they were really my friends, I could trust them all. Because that’s my definition of a friend: someone I can trust.

Knowing whom to trust is not a new problem. But as more people gain access to our lives and attention through social networking, it’s a problem that we need to ponder with increasing frequency. Those friendly acquaintances who want me to recommend them for a job or rent me an apartment for a night—can I rely on them to not embezzle from their new employer or to refrain from giving me bedbugs? Are their recommendations genuine, or are they flogging their wares for profit?

Trust is all about instinct. If you had all the facts, you wouldn’t need trust. Trust is what is required in the absence of proof. But I believe you can strengthen your instincts by testing them; every time you prove yourself right or wrong, they grow stronger. I’ve discovered that a great way to test my instincts with regard to trustworthiness or lack thereof is by reading mystery novels and thrillers—like the 2015 novel The Girl on the Train by the British novelist Paula Hawkins.

Before I read The Girl on the Train, I already knew quite a lot about this novel. I knew that it was a thriller about a girl named Rachel who took “the same commuter train every morning and night.” I knew that the train, every day, would stop at a signal that allowed her to view the same couple having breakfast on their deck and that she looked forward to this. And that she began to feel that she’d started to know them. I knew that she had names for them and had invented a scenario in which theirs was the perfect life.

I also knew that one day she would see something that would shock her. It would be for only a scant minute. Suddenly, everything would change. I knew that Rachel would go to the police. And I knew that soon she would be “deeply entangled not only in the investigation but in the lives of everyone involved.” What I didn’t know was whether by going to the police she’d done “more harm than good.”

The reason I knew all of this is simple. That’s what the publisher wanted me to know—this information is from the book flap on the American edition of the hardcover. Unless I had willfully decided not to read the flap, there’s no way I could have not known this.

But I had heard about this novel even before I read the flap: it’s rare to read any book without knowing something of it beforehand, whether from a friend, a review, a bookseller, or a comment online. And most people don’t want to read a book unless they know a little something about it, even if only where it’s set.

Once you begin reading The Girl on the Train, it soon becomes apparent that Rachel may be what people call an unreliable narrator. That is, she may or may not be telling the reader the truth. There’s a great tradition of books featuring unreliable narrators: The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, published in 1915, is the most influential; it’s a brilliantly cynical novel about marriage and infidelity. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, a startling suspense novel from 2012, is another book that features an unreliable narrator, and also includes a deeply cynical view of marriage, with a considerably bloodier plot than The Good Soldier’s.

But if you’ve read The Girl on the Train, you know at the end whether Rachel has been honest or lying. If you haven’t read it, I’m not going to tell you. You’re going to have to read the book and try to figure it out as you go along. Rachel is jealous, often irrational, and obsessed with her ex; she is deeply flawed and deeply human, sympathetic and infuriating. You want to trust her, but she keeps giving you reasons not to. Just when you think you know what’s going on, you realize maybe you don’t.

That’s why Rachel, like most unreliable narrators, is not really an unreliable narrator at all; she’s a possibly unreliable narrator.

The fun of reading a book with a possibly unreliable narrator, as opposed to reading a book with a certainly unreliable narrator, is that you don’t know for sure whether you are being told, in whole or in part, the truth. If you know for a fact that the narrator is unreliable, then that’s not really an unreliable narrator at all; it’s simply a dishonest one.

Rachel is one of three narrators in The Girl on the Train; what makes her particularly intriguing as the main character in a thriller is that she admits to lying in order to get people to take her story seriously (“If I admitted the truth, the trust would be gone”) and that she is possibly lying even to herself. It’s as though she’s Sherlock Holmes and, maybe, the criminal Moriarty all in one. She drinks a lot of booze, and she frequently blacks out, and so she’s not exactly sure what she has and hasn’t witnessed or done.

At one point, she contemplates hypnosis. But she rejects that when her therapist tells her that memories “retrieved” (she tells us he puts air quotes around that word) through hypnosis can’t always be trusted. She tells us, “I can’t risk it. I couldn’t bear to have other images in my head, yet more memories that I can’t trust, memories that merge and morph and shift, fooling me into believing what is not, telling me to look one way when really I should be looking another way.”

Perhaps her massive lack of clarity is among the reasons I (along with so many other readers) relate to Rachel. Most of us are sometimes uncertain about what we’ve done. In a world where we are bombarded with messages and constantly looking at screens, or a world in which we ourselves sometimes drink to excess, reality can blur, and sometimes we blur it. Did I read that? Did I send that text? Was that something I saw, read, or dreamed? Often we don’t know. And that’s frightening enough. What’s even more frightening, though, is when we are sure of something that we saw, did, or read—and then find out that we couldn’t have or didn’t.

“I’m certain it was raining; we ate barbecue; and Jim told that funny story,” I might say to my husband.

“Well, I’m certain that it was sunny; we ate burgers; and it was Mary who told that funny story,” he might reply.

In a perfect world, we would both be wrong: the day would have been hazy; we would have eaten fried chicken; and Edgar would have told the tale. That would spare both of us the annoyance of hearing “I told you so” when the truth is revealed. More often, however, only one of us is remembering things inaccurately.

Finding out that you were wrong when you were sure you were right is like that moment in cartoons when a character runs off a cliff and freezes in midair for a few seconds before plummeting. There is a brief instant when you still hold on to the hope that you were right before conceding total wrongness—and it’s only then that the ground falls out from under you.

If we can’t always trust ourselves, then how can we ever trust anyone else?

The answer provided by thrillers is that, even when you are surrounded by strangers, eventually you may need to trust someone. And it’s sometimes the last person you thought you could trust. In order to misdirect us, clever thriller writers give characters prejudices and biases that readers share. Ultimately, characters save themselves by breaking free of these. Maybe the government official isn’t out to help you. Maybe the petty criminal on the corner is the only person who can save your life.

And so it goes with Facebook and all the people who enter our lives in person and on the Internet. Whom they know, what they do for a living, and how they look tell us very little about them. What they say about themselves tells us very little, too. Are they reliable or unreliable? Sometimes they don’t even know themselves.

Novels like The Girl on the Train give us the tools we need to try to figure out whom we can trust, and whom to keep at electronic arm’s length, helping us focus more on how our “friends” behave than on how they appear or what they say.

And here’s one more thing I’ve learned from mysteries and thrillers: the only people you should never, ever trust are the people who say, “Trust me.”