‘Listen to Me’ turns troubled marriage, road trip into a captivating thriller

Hannah Pittard’s captivating third novel, “Listen to Me,” focuses on a smart, attractive couple who have reached that point, not unknown in marriage, when partners fear that the person they love is driving them crazy.

Pittard, having introduced these troubled lovers, sends them on a journey across the United States that soon places their lives in peril. You won’t put this story down.

After eight years of marriage, Mark and Maggie live in Chicago, where he’s a college professor and she runs a veterinary clinic. But their lives abruptly change when Maggie, walking home from work, is mugged and left unconscious on the sidewalk. Deeply shaken, she begins staying home all day, obsessively searching the internet for examples of violence. She buys Mace and a knife and thinks about getting a gun.

Aided by therapy, she’s improving when she’s blindsided by another shock. After a murder in the neighborhood, police appear one afternoon to show Maggie photos of the dead woman and ask questions that might link the two crimes. That grim encounter leaves Maggie newly devastated: “Mark had been trying so hard — those kisses, those hand squeezes — to be patient. But Maggie, freshly fanatic and disturbed beyond language at the pictures of the coed, dedicated herself anew to her sadness, to the Internet, to any story that might confirm her suspicions of the world, of the turbulent state of humanity.”

Such is their unsettled state as they depart for Virginia to visit Mark’s parents. They’re bickering as they leave; each blames the other for their late departure. They also disagree about their traveling companion, Gerome, a big mutt that Maggie loves like the child she has never had but that Mark calls neurotic.

They soon find that storms, even tornadoes, have hit the states they must drive across. And something unspoken haunts their journey. Maggie suspects that Mark has someone else on his mind. And he does: a very beautiful, very flirtatious student.

When he and Maggie argue, he asks himself if he really wants to spend the rest of his life with his increasingly exasperating wife when this vibrant young woman is his for the asking.

Yet he loves his wife. Pittard brilliantly explores the couple’s reliance on each other, the mingled joy, mystery and sadness of their marriage. Mark thinks: “She drove him crazy, but that’s how he knew he still cared.”

Part of their bond is physical. Once on the trip, he gazes at his wife, and “her legs were glistening from the rain. He wanted to run his hands up and down them, an animal desire for ownership.” In bed, anger gives way to passion as “Maggie gradually became aware of that sublimely simple craving. She wanted to be touched.”

The storm rages, worsens. The power is out in much of Ohio. Streetlights don’t work. Hotels have neither electricity nor vacancies. People they encounter are hostile. Soon the reader is seized by dread.

We like Mark and Maggie, whatever their faults. We worry for Maggie especially because we know her fear of violence; it becomes painful to imagine what fate awaits her. In the middle-of-the-night rain and darkness, they’re lost on a back road in West Virginia, searching for a hotel that may not exist and fearful of a truck that’s following them. We’re not far from “Deliverance” country, imagining the worst.

Pittard addresses two quite different subjects in this novel: the problems of the marriage and the dangers of the trip. Ultimately, the relationship is the more difficult challenge, the greater storm.

At one point, Mark reflects on the obstacles that they and countless lovers confront in this world: “They were all on the decline, a steep and fast decline. But they — he and Maggie — were on it together, battling the storm in the same defenseless boat. They had no chance of defeating it, of course. But they could try.”

A decade ago, as a graduate student in creative writing at the University of Virginia, Pittard studied under Ann Beattie, whom she hugely admired. Today, Pittard has found her voice and is operating at a level few writers attain. Her previous novels, “The Fates Will Find Their Way” (2011) and “Reunion” (2014), both received rave reviews. Pittard deserves the attention of anyone in search of today’s best fiction.

This story was originally published July 30, 2016 at 9:00 AM with the headline "‘Listen to Me’ turns troubled marriage, road trip into a captivating thriller."