Keep Her Sweet by Helen Fitzgerald review – a thriller packed with monsters and misery

Helen Fitzgerald writes books that seem made for television: compelling page-turners with characters pushed well beyond their limits. Child kidnappings, viral videos, couples on the brink – it’s the stuff of train wrecks and soap operas and there’s certainly no shortage of viewers for either.

In Keep Her Sweet, Fitzgerald’s latest thriller, a therapist navigating her own family crisis finds comfort in the disintegration of others. Joy, on the brink of retirement, dreams of moving to the UK to be with her sister, Rosie. But Joy’s 42-year-old daughter Jeanie is coming out of rehab for the fourth time, and Joy doesn’t want to leave until she’s sure that Jeanie is going to be OK. In the meantime, she comforts herself with the misery of her clients; usually, their unhappy lives make her own bearable by comparison.

But Joy’s latest clients are far from a comfort, and as she finds herself drawn further into their misery, the cracks in her own family start to show.

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Fitzgerald shows an eagerness to examine the monstrous side of her characters, exposing the underbellies of the families she writes about. Joy’s clients, Penny and Andeep, and their two adult daughters, Asha and Camille, are stuck in a cycle of blame and resentment. Penny resents Andeep over their failed move to regional Melbourne, while Andeep holds his wife responsible for his unsuccessful comedy career.

Both resent their daughters, fully grown and unable to live independently. Camille has moved home to save money but has failed todo so, while Asha is under house-arrest, an ankle bracelet tracking her movements after an affair with her priest ended violently.

There is something raw and familiar in all of these characters and their flaws. They’re the parts of ourselves we’d prefer not to see – the excesses, indulgences and petty grievances. Isn’t that why we’re drawn to the monster? To see parts of ourselves reflected and comfort ourselves that at least we aren’t that bad?

It’s a tension that Fitzgerald plays with via Joy, who at first delights in the terrible energy radiating from the family: “The vibe was so toxic that Joy was positively beaming inside. Her family was not so bad. Her life was not so sad.”

In some ways this aligns Joy with the reader: Andeep, Penny, Asha and Camille are all deeply unlikeable and self-pitying. By contrast, Joy at least attempts to consider the people around her, although frequently lacks the agency to make decisions in her own best interests.

The polarity of these positions – self-obsessed to servitude – raises some interesting moral dilemmas and constantly troubles the reader’s footing. Why do we act the way we do? And why should we act any other way?

In 2013 Fitzgerald published her most critically acclaimed book, The Cry, which was later turned into a well-received limited series by the BBC. Both The Cry, and her later novel, Viral, have been praised for being gripping and psychologically astute. This praise is easily applied to Keep Her Sweet, which runs every one of the characters through the psychological wringer.

Fitzgerald seems less interested in questions of what is likely to happen and far more interested in questions of the extreme conditions under which onemight entirely and completely break. Sometimes – perhaps too frequently – plausibility is stretched too far, which allows the tension to sag.

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It’s difficult to categorise this book neatly by genre. Although it presents as a crime, and contains elements of the thriller, it’s possibly more closely aligned to something like Jodi Picoult or other books that use the frameworks of crime thrillers to explore more domestic dramas.

It’s not a petty distinction to make here because, against the recent wave of politically charged, socially aware and equally compelling Australian crime novels, Keep Her Sweet falls short. But if we are to encounter it as an escape, as a chance to forget the misery and stresses of our lives against the over-the-top extremes of fiction, then it is a rousing success.

• Keep Her Sweet by Helen Fitzgerald is published by Affirm Press ($29.99) in Australia and Orenda in the UK (£8.99).