The Woman in the Library

The Boston Public Library is an important locale in the novel, but it is also a symbol for storytelling. The Reading Room appears in the prologue and Chapter 1 as a place with history, and its association with respected American writers overwhelms Freddie and Leo A. Caroline Palfrey’s scream transforms the Reading Room into a space where Freddie, Cain, and Marigold rely on logic and intuition to construct a story about what happened to Caroline. Writers and readers alike rely on story and narrative to shape how they see reality, and that is certainly what Whit and the other three major characters do as a result of their encounter in the Reading Room. The story they all tell each other is that they are four friends brought together by sheer chance. Freddie, Marigold, and Cain are acting on partial information, however. Whit is using the Reading Room to deceive and manipulate the other three, showing that the stories we tell are so powerful that they can be dangerous. Freddie also ignores red flags about Cain because she is so caught up in the romantic story of four friends brought together by chance.

Gentill relies on a popular culture motif to underscore the themes of Reality Versus Imagination and The Power of Reading and Writing. Pop culture references proliferate during the climax of the story-within-a-story, the moment when Whit reveals he is the killer. He calls Boo’s extortion scheme Boo going “Batman” (243), and he compares the other three to the sleuth characters in the animated series Scooby Doo. These two references are shorthand for Whit’s understanding of the motivations of Boo, Freddie, Marigold, and Cain; he imagines them as cartoon-like figures whose belief in justice and goodness are unsophisticated. The reality is that all three are sophisticated enough to unravel his plot despite all the red herrings he throws their way. These cartoon figures also have in common with Cain, Marigold, and Freddie that the pursuit of justice motivates them. Although Whit sees a belief in justice as naive, that belief allows the other three members of the group to persist despite the escalating violence around them. Restoration of order and justice being done are two of the most satisfying parts of reading mysteries like the one Hannah attempts to write before Leo A intervenes in her writing process. These references to cartoon figures thus underscore The Power of Reading and Writing—storytelling in particular—to shape people’s perceptions of reality.

Gentill relies on Freddie’s Japanese notebook and Cain’s incident room to symbolize two different approaches to writing. Freddie is a pantser whose initial draft is so unruly that she needs a Japanese notebook—an accordion-like notebook comprised of a very long page that fits inside the notebook cover only by many vertical folds in the page—to make sense of it all. She allows her creativity to flow as she writes, confident that she can impose order after the fact. Cain’s prewriting process is rigorously ordered with lines connecting characters and plot points, and the incident room is generally complete before he sits down to write, although he may return to it if he gets stuck. Cain is a plotter. Both Freddie and Cain are able to exercise their creativity despite their contrast in process, underscoring that there are many productive ways to write.