We were happy and secure. We had everything we needed.
There was no way for anyone to know – at least of all me – that it would all end the way it did.
Thomas Martin is sure he is a good man; he is everything that he thinks a man is supposed to be
He looks after his sick mother, and his adult twin sisters. He’s got a gorgeous house on Long Island, and he’s got “his girls”, his wife Miriam and his daughter Ava, who he is determined to protect. He’s a provider; he’s a protector and he’s the patriarch of his family.
But Ani Katz’s debut novel A Good Man soon makes it clear: Thomas’ ‘perfect’ life has gone horribly, horribly, wrong.
The novel quickly moves around in time: from Thomas’ childhood, to the present day, to his recollection of what happened to ‘his girls’. And while it can be confusing at points, it is his self-serving retelling – with the novel told solely from his point of view – that draws the reader in from almost the very first words.
Thomas is going through the story, so he claims, in an effort to understand why – and how – his life turned out the way that it has. But amid all of Thomas’ assertions of “I may have” or “I can’t remember”, there are a number of characters who share conflicting accounts to what he tells the reader.
The first time he met his wife. A drunken night with a colleague. A once-in-a-lifetime presentation at work.
To call him an unreliable narrator would be a massive understatement. He claims that he understands where his life has gone wrong, and that he’s tried his best. But as the book goes on, Thomas’ possessiveness and paranoia grows – and every page brings a fresh sense of foreboding, unease, and just a general sense that readers aren’t getting the whole story.
A Good Man is the kind of book that I thought I would be able to sit down, and read a few chapters to get a sense of it. But in what felt like the blink of an eye, I was hooked – and ‘just-one-more-page’-ing my way through to the end.
Katz’s debut is one that will have readers gripped from the very first words until the last – and a book that will stay with you for a long while afterwards.
