How to Tell an Open Secret
They were young, still in college, when one night he lashed out and choked her—backed her against the wall, his hands on her neck, so she thought she was going to die. She crept home and hardly spoke of it, told one trusted friend years later, while he rose in the ranks of the country’s powerful, a political wunderkind. Then she learned of his young female protégée’s death, thought of what he might have done to her. She was bent on coming forward. She thought it was her duty.
This is the basic premise of Idra Novey’s novel, Those Who Knew. The echoes of high-profile, real-life stories are obvious. The parallels would be uncanny if the narratives were more unusual; after a year’s steady drumbeat of disturbing allegations, though, these details feel all too familiar.
Amid this climate, three novels—; Kate; and Anna Burns’s —vividly portray the long tail of sexual violence and harassment. The stories are at once immersive and fragmented, with details that, by turns, are hazy and indelible. In tracing the origins of open secrets to their flawed, incomplete resolutions, they show how fiction can illuminate the lingering effects of sexual misconduct.
