Sara Sligar’s debut Take Me Apart was a taut psychological thriller that made a few award short lists and best of lists in 2020. Just as that book was hard to pigeonhole genre-wise so too her new book Vantage Point – with elements of gothic, technothriller and lifestyles of the ultra-wealthy. Although, in the end, Vantage Point, if anything, is a more down the line psychological thriller. That said, while the subject matter is very different, Vantage Point shares many of the same underlying themes as Sligar’s debut.
Clara Wieland has taken over running the family grants program to allow her older brother Teddy to run for the Senate. The two surviving Wielands are the descendants of an obscenely wealthy family who own the grand house and land on an island off the coast of Maine. They are surviving in the sense that many of their ancestors, including their parents, died in strange ways always during the month of April. So much so that there is a rumour of a Wieland family curse centred on that month (elucidated through Wikipedia entries scattered through the novel). As April starts, a sex tape of Clara is released to the internet, putting a spoke in Teddy’s Senatorial campaign. Clara had a checkered adulthood and so is too embarrassed to reveal that she remembers nothing of the events depicted in the video. But then another video emerges and Clara begins to suspect that the videos are part of a deepfake campaign. Meanwhile Jess, her childhood best friend and now Teddy’s wife, is trying to keep her marriage together under the pressure of a political campaign.
There is alot going on in Vantage Point but Sligar manages to keep it all together. Central to that are the characters of Clara and Jess, not only their current circumstances but glimpses of their childhood friendship. But there is a particular leap of faith needed from readers that pushes this novel from psychological thriller into technothriller territory (if they need to define it by subgenre) as the plot reveals itself.
But actually, the plot, while pacey and page-turning, exists for another purpose. And that is Sligar’s continuing exploration of the way in which women are treated in society and the different standards expected of them. She does this in many ways, from the different reactions to the various fake videos, to the way in which Jess sublimates herself into her marriage, to the banality of the ultimate reveals (which seem to be deliberately anticlimactic), to the consequences of those reveals. In this novel Sligar is also interested in concepts of class and perception. Jess is seen by the community as marrying up, essentially marrying for the money. Different rules apply to Jess than to those who were born into that life, this is made clear not only by the townspeople but by Teddy’s campaign staff and ultimately by Teddy himself.
Vantage Point is another fascinating novel from Sligar. Driven by two extremely flawed characters involved in a well-constructed mystery. Unfortunately, more than a little bit of suspension of disbelief is needed to make this work fully. While deepfake technology is possibly more insidious than portrayed in the book, there are some other technologies employed here that may be leaning more towards the day-after-tomorrow. But, as already mentioned, this is all in service of much larger themes and help Sligar to land her punches.
Vantage Point by Sara Sligar
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