Book Review

Agnes wants to die. But her suicidal impulse is not an indifferent, sleepy malaise; she is a woman with a vision. She wants to be publicly murdered, and she needs to find exactly the right person to do it. In Hallie Elizabeth Newton’s debut novel, Agnes Lives!, we follow the titular Agnes as she scouts out potential murderers—friends, acquaintances, and lovers who she hopes will willingly hold the gun, summarily relieving her of her hollow existence, a deadening routine of fitness classes, intrusive thoughts, and demeaning interactions with Nathan, her much older, emotionally neglectful narcissist-artist-boyfriend.

Readers might recognize the premise from Muriel Spark’s 1970 gothic thriller, The Driver’s Seat. Spark’s novella, which has become something of a cult classic since its publication, is a forensic look at Lise’s final twenty-four hours. Lise, like Agnes, is looking for the “right” person to murder her, but while Agnes discloses her motives in chapter two, Lise’s remain opaque until the very end of the book. Because the narration allows us a peek into the future, we know that she is going to die, but we assume she is about to fall victim to another man’s violent plans. We are completely blind sighted when we discover that she has been the architect all along, that the person “behind” her death is none other than Lise herself.

For most of the story, we have no context through which to interpret Lise’s seemingly erratic behavior—buying garish new clothing, traveling to a foreign city without an itinerary, befriending a dotty old woman. When she trails a businessman onto a plane and strategically takes a seat next to him, we might assume romantic intent. Indeed, there is something romantic about the relationship between murderer and victim, as Spark presents it. As the plane engine begins to rev, the man looks up at her in alarm. Shortly after, he bolts from his seat and relocates to another part of the plane. Another man sitting nearby takes a predatory interest in her, insisting that he is her “type.” But like a jilted lover, she’s still fixated on the first man. Several hours later, just before the first man murders Lise at her behest, she says, “As soon as I saw you this morning, I knew you were the one. You’re my type.” For this is what she’s been seeking all along—not a man to give her love, but a man to take her life.

For Agnes, there is also a romantic charge between her and her hypothetical murderer. A lover, according to Agnes, is someone who sees you, who handles your body with care, who makes you feel real. Nathan does none of these things. Nathan is usually too preoccupied with his work to give Agnes little more than cursory, indifferent sex. She is at most a warm body, occupying a woman-shaped space, and at least a nuisance, a distraction from artistic excellence. While Nathan sleeps (“when he wakes, maybe he’ll love me,” she thinks,) Agnes brutalizes her body into shape at a SoulCycle class, and then stops at a cafe for a latte. On a whim, she asks the barista to kill her, and when she sees his horror, she backtracks, claiming she was kidding. On her way out, she consoles herself, “But he wasn’t the right person.” The scene contains a whiff of a cafe meet-cute gone wrong: misreading a barista’s friendliness for flirtation, being rejected, retreating in humiliation.

Agnes Lives! is a remarkable inversion of Spark’s original conceit. Spark’s third person narration is unusual, in that it possesses neither intimacy nor omniscience. Everything we know of Lise is conveyed through her physical appearance, actions, and speech. There’s perhaps a freedom in this. If Spark tells us anything about Lise, it’s that she hates being interpreted. On the very first page of the book, Lise tries on a dress in a department store. As the sales girl begins to boast its stain-resistant qualities, Lise begins pulling at the neck fastener; she is literally strangled by people’s interpretations of her. “Who asked you for a stain-resisting dress?” she shouts as she tears off the dress. “I won’t be insulted!” Fittingly, Spark shields Lise against literary interpretation by concealing her inner life entirely.

But while Lise’s interiority remains safe from the leering gaze of men and curious readers alike, Newton deprives Agnes this same privacy, rendering her through an overly intimate stream of consciousness. Even the dialogue is paraphrased rather than quoted speech, which means that everyone we meet is filtered through (and perhaps distorted by) the disturbing workings of Agnes’s brain. By shining a black light on Agnes’s most odious thoughts and harrowing memories, Newton denies her the privacy that Lise enjoys. But maybe for Agnes, this is a kind of bliss. For what Agnes wants, more than anything, is to be seen. “I don’t want to go in the river,” she says, as she finally begs Nathan himself to kill her. “I want my body to be found.” She wants him to put her body in the Elizabeth Street Sculpture Garden, where she’d once wanted a wedding. If weddings are a kind of cultural apex for female visibility, murders are a sinister close second.

Ultimately, Newton’s retelling is even darker than its inspiration, and possibly more tragic. Because deep down, even as Agnes hopes that death will set her free, she knows it’s a poor substitute for being loved or seen. Recognizing that her deepest desires are little more than a hackneyed literary trope, she complains, “. . . why does every feminist book end with the woman dying? like Kate Chopin’s protagonist in The Awakening? . . . And Butterfield 8, which turned into a movie. And Thelma and Louise. They all die. It symbolizes freedom.” Dying young and tragically would only be the fulfillment of her literary destiny. Soon, her face and name will blur among the faces and names of all the female protagonists before her, who felt trapped, unloved, and unseen and sought an exit.