In ‘You Will Know Me,’ the Mystery is Everybody

You Will Know Me is an emotionally grisly mystery story where the crime was committed long before the dead body appeared. Set in one of those suburbs where certain kinds of parents seem to do nothing but act as a shuttle service for their off-spring (school, activities, repeat), Megan Abbott’s novel starts at a party where everything just seems wrong no matter how much effort is put into making it right. Parents and teenagers mingle. There’s too much sweet-tasting alcohol, too many songs remembered from younger and more daring times, and too many limits tested. It’s as though everybody were rewarding themselves for abstaining from their true, dark desires for so long.

Abbott’s protagonist, Katie Knox, is a mother who never meant to be one of those moms. She was a normal knockabout teenager with a bad “Grrl” tattoo to show for it, not to mention too few years between her and her oldest child’s ages. For Katie and her husband Eric, at this stage in their lives, it has all become about Devon, their elite 15-year-old gymnast daughter whom everybody in their circle refers to as “our Devon”.

Katie loses herself along with the other adults at a party, which (“like all the others”) is ostensibly held to honor Devon’s latest success, but seems more there to reward the parents for everything they think they have sacrificed. So what if the wrong spouses end up dancing together or more than one woman gets a little too cozy with Ryan, the coach’s daughter’s boyfriend whom most of the gymnast girls are a little in love with? “Who could have seen,” she wonders, “anything at all that night but their bright-spangled beauty?” Even though it takes up just a few pages, the party expertly sets the tone of line-crossing danger and about-to-erupt chaos that keeps the rest of the novel thrumming nervously under your fingers.

Of course, there must be a death. Ryan, that beautiful and fawned-over creature, is killed by a hit-and-run driver on a dark road. It’s a wrenching episode when it happens, “a tear in the seam of everything”. Instead of launching into whodunit mode, however, the novel keeps on track with everybody’s organizing principle: ensuring that Devon has everything she needs for the next meet. Because Devon is the champion, and behind her aerodynamic fuselage of a body lies a troubling pile of financial and egotistical concerns.

Abbott, who masters the tricky task of speedy pacing and yet patient plotting, takes her time moving into the mystery. The early pages of You Will Know Me are nevertheless thick with incipient violence and nerves, from the cringing story about Devon’s childhood lawnmower accident that left one of her feet disfigured to the punishing atmosphere of permanent competition.

By the time the body makes its appearance, Abbott has already established that this circle of hyper-competitive pre-athletes, encircled by boosters and rivals and altogether too much pressure for any teen or pre-teen is a spider’s web of adolescent jealousies and obsessions further fueled by the barely mature adults supposedly running the show. She creates that atmosphere of fear and ambition and dread where fear of losing the competition morphs into fear of then losing out getting into a good school. Soon the book feels like less of a mystery at times than it does a referendum on the frazzled nature of the modern American suburb, somewhere between Bad Moms and Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

Katie is held rapt by the appearance of her daughter, a creature so seemingly foreign that it’s like having a stranger in her home. In that sense, Katie is like most any parent, forever baffled by their progeny, with their invisible and unknowable desires and motivations. But Katie’s ruminations have a darker edge, a nearly fearful fascination with her uber-athlete whose drive and determination (so different from Katie’s more passive nature) fail to mark her as her mother’s daughter. Instead, Katie imagines the dauntless and imperturbable Devon as “a war-battered refugee. A KGB spy”.

Like the rest of the hollow-eyed gym-rat parents and keeningly ambitious gymnast girls, Katie is fascinated by Devon’s body, which her eyes scour as though searching for clues:

Less than five feet tall, a hard, smooth shell of a body. Hipless, breastless still, but the way she’d transformed her body in the last two years, thighs like trunks, shoulders and biceps straining her tank-top straps, staggered Katie.

This steady, obsessing gaze keeps the novel on edge even when nothing in particular is happening. Like any good noir craftsperson, Abbott keeps the scales tipping at all times, pushing our gaze to how in the bright glare of a potential murder investigation, the normally take-charge Eric starts to lose his spine, or that gothic tendency their younger question mark of a son Drew has of dreaming stygian nightmares about Devon flying out of the house, or having claws for feet.

That sense of monstrosity, bodies pushed to their limits, is something that Abbott explores with a surprisingly emotive honesty. The pushing and pulling of these girls into contorted competitive frames of mind and physical transformations is continually referred to, with more than a little of the horrified editorializing of a book like Joan Ryan’s Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters.

The making of such tough yet ever-breakable competitors like Devon has already happened by the time Abbott came to her story. What she’s interested in, and what makes You Will Know Me such nail-biting reading, is that wait for the breaking.