BRIGHT YOUNG WOMEN, by Jessica Knoll
Early in Jessica Knoll’s third novel, “Bright Young Women,” there is a haunting aside that points to the rest of the book like the rustling of leaves before a hurricane: “She turned the handle and pushed her hands against the glass , leaving imprints that would soon have no living match.”
For Pamela Schumacher, the storm is a serial killer who broke into her college dorm in Tallahassee, Florida in 1978. Four sisters are attacked. Two survive, traumatized and scarred. Two women die. Pamela is the only sister to see the killer’s face – and forty years later she is still haunted by him and mourns the friends whose lives were snuffed out.
“Three impeachments. One pandemic. The towers are coming down. Facebook. Tickle me Elmo. Snapple iced tea. They never got to taste Snapple iced tea,” Knoll wrote. ‘But that didn’t happen in a bygone era either. If they were still alive, they would be the same age as Michelle Pfeiffer.
Knoll refers to the intruder only as “the defendant,” which is a smart, important choice, as serial killers are too often portrayed as diabolical masterminds rather than the hideous lifebloodsuckers that they are. This one is meticulously based on a certain rapist and murderer who got his start in the Pacific Northwest, who has played a major role in pop culture and is invariably played by bright young actors like Mark Harmon and Zac Efron. Although he looms large in the imagination of crime junkies and the tabloids, his victims are too often reduced to footnotes. Knoll flips that script in “Bright Young Women.”
In the opening of the novel, Knoll recounts the night of the crime in a tense but frustrating manner. The tension builds, sometimes at the expense of the story flow. The chapter titles provide a macabre countdown, followed by the gruesome slog of the aftermath: the shock, the indifferent police, the ignorant campus authorities. Knoll teases once too often with dark twists in later chapters, so I found myself keeping clues when I should have been experiencing the directness of her prose.
Pamela meets Tina, a wealthy widow who tries to get justice for Ruth, who was one of the defendant’s first victims. In the hustle and bustle of the trial in Florida, Ruth is in danger of becoming yet another lost soul.
As the story jumps forward and back in time, with Pamela and Ruth offering alternating points of view, it is a testament to Knoll’s skill that you are never adrift in the story. The women are distinctive and memorable. Pamela recoils in disgust from her responsible, cheerful facade; Ruth is naive and hopeful.
There are sharp, tantalizing details: “She did that rich man thing again and begged me to pity her by accepting all her charities.” There are ironic – or tragic, depending on how you read them – signposts of societal horrors yet to come. For example, this conversation between Pamela and Tina in 1978:
“Have you ever heard of anorexia?” Tina asked, looking at the label on the bottle.
“The thing where women starve themselves?” I said in a doubtful voice as I slid a pair of jeans down my legs. “That wasn’t Denise,” I said naively. “She was just very careful about what she ate.”
There is so much simmering anger – in every dismissive comment from a homicide detective or concerned journalist (later on the verge of a book deal) – that all Pamela can do is keep her emotions in check.
Knoll is also adept at showing pain, especially in an otherwise ridiculous scene where Pamela comes face to face with her friends’ killer in court. Dressed in a suit, representing himself, he questions her account of the evening:
“Was it a lot of blood or just some blood?”
“It was a lot.”
There was a pout of his lips, like an air kiss. At that moment I understood. This was all he wanted: to relive it. There was no hatch under my feet, at least not one that the defendant had a drawstring on. He had called me here to remove the goriest bits from my memory.
Even more sickening is this detail (apparently taken from real life), which contradicts the news media’s narrative of the defendant as a young man with a sharp legal mind: “The way his team had to manage him, pushing unimportant witnesses to the witness stand to shout so he had someone to question without torpedoing the defense would later remind me of a toddler who got one of those play mobiles because that’s what the adults had and he’s not a baby.”
‘Bright Young Women’ is packed with moments where you feel the scale of the deck against any woman, young or old, who dares to be ‘smart’. There is always something in the dark that curses the bright and the hopeful. Knoll doesn’t make Pamela’s journey (or ours) easy, but ends in a cathartic, long-pent-up scream that more people need to hear. And you hope that telling this story (and more like it) will shred the “murderer/genius” myth piece by piece.
Patton Oswalt is an Emmy and Grammy Award-winning writer and comedian.
BRIGHT YOUNG WOMEN | By Jessica Knoll | 384 pages | Marysue Rucci Books | $27.99
