The Couple Next Door

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-8

Chapters 9-14

Chapters 15-21

Chapters 22-29

Chapters 30-37

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

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Themes

Postpartum Depression and Parental Paranoia

The Couple Next Door offers as a probing examination of the emotional effects of early motherhood, and the fears that threaten to consume new parents. Early in the novel, Anne admits her disappointment with new motherhood, expressing that “When Marco went back to work, the days had begun to feel unbearably long. Anne filled the hours as best she could, but it was lonely” (87). This feeling of estrangement from her child counters cultural assumptions about women and inherent maternal sensibilities. Anne has internalized these cultural beliefs, and she sees herself as flawed to the extent that her guilt over her post-partum depression transforms into an assumption that she is guilty of the murder of her daughter. In the six months since Cora’s birth, Anne has seldom slept—her mind racing with fears over her lack of maternal instincts. She experiences wild mood swings. She drinks recklessly. She feels paranoid that others are judging her. Lapena uses Anne’s experience to hyperbolize the experiences of many new parents, sleep-deprived and suddenly confronted with a host of new fears about both their abilities as caretakers and for the safety of their child. In the tragic kidnapping of Cora, Lapena takes these fears to extreme conclusions, while also positing that the true problem lies not with Anne’s struggle to adapt to motherhood, but with those around her who would use her daughter for their own evil aims. By contrast, Marco publicly presents as a doting and concerned father. He is so confident in his role as a new father that he risks harm to his daughter for his own personal gain. It is only when he realizes that he no longer has control over Cora’s circumstances or care that Marco realizes the depth of his love for his child. In this way, Lapena dramatizes the terrifying realization of parents that they cannot protect their children from all possibilities of harm, no matter how hard they try.

As Anne drifts into a private world of self-recrimination, Lapena intensifies her feeling of isolation. Anne’s psychiatrist is out of the country, leaving her without support in confronting her trauma, depression, and misplaced feelings of guilt. Ultimately, the kidnapping gives Anne a chance to realize just how much she had, in fact, bonded with Cora. Cora’s disappearance triggers not relief but a profound and complex concern. By the end of the novel, Anne kills Cynthia for even suggesting harm against her daughter, confirming her deep love for her baby. Through this violent, unexpected confirmation, Lapena resists a cheerful confirmation of the beauty of parenting, and suggests a dark and complex nature to the parent-child relationship. What Anne perceived as her moral failure to bond with her daughter transforms into an amoral willingness to defend her daughter at all costs.

The Insidious Pull of Greed

In the end, the kidnapping plot is all about money. Marco sees his once-promising business flailing and understands the only way to resuscitate it is through an infusion of substantial capital to give him yet another chance. Marco’s greed compels him to negotiate a long-shot kidnapping scheme that places his six-month old daughter in the hands of a co-conspirator he barely knows. Because of his greed, the baby’s safety becomes defined entirely by the ransom money her family can offer. In the first stages of the kidnapping, Marco and Richard calmly suggest that first $3 million, then $5 million might take care of the problem. When Marco loses that money at the farmhouse, another $2 million is requested. Richard and Marco’s cavalier attitude regarding these large sums, and their single-minded focus on attaining as much as possible over ensuring Cora’s safety, reveals how accustomed the family is to using money to create a world of their own control and design.

Richard is driven by the same insidious pull of greed as Marco is. Unhappy with the prospect of a divorce from Alice that would leave him a pauper, Richard is revealed as the true mastermind of the kidnapping scheme that centers his own innocent granddaughter. He manipulates his own son-in-law’s desperation over a failing business, and also uses money as a rationale for the vicious murder of the man he conscripted into helping with the kidnapping—also with the promise of money. Richard’s lover Cynthia displays a similar interest in money, and a similar understanding of how to use money to manipulate others. She disregards even a modest interest in morality or compassion and coolly sits on the videotape of Marco for days before using it to secure blackmail monies from first Marco and then Anne.

The absent moral integrity of the novel’s principal characters reveals the corrosive impact of greed. No amount of money is enough, no show of wealth too ostentatious. What is ironic of course is that for all the mayhem and all the moral corruption triggered by greed, these characters, the three families, are anything but destitute. They live in expensive houses, wear elegant clothes, drive multiple cars, and eat lavish food. They are not desperate for money—they just want more. Greed then, the apparently insatiable craving for more money, is the primary engine for the novel’s thematic argument.

Fear of the Truth

In the police procedural genre, the entire narrative progression is driven by the relentless search for the truth. It is the only thing of value—and its reclamation or at restoration at the end of a story typically offers what optimism such crime mysteries can generate.

Within the tight, claustrophobic bindings of the Conti clan, however, strategies abound to avoid confronting the truth. If honesty is, according to conventional wisdom, the best policy, the Conti family shows the emotional and psychological impact of the studied distortion of the truth. Every family tie is held together through lies or clumsy evasions of truth, long-buried secrets, and even, as with Anne’s dissociative disorder, the physical short-circuiting of memory itself. Marco’s elaborate plot to kidnap his own daughter compels him to maintain a shadow life, underscored by the cell phone Anne finds in the air conditioning vent. Anne keeps secret her inability to bond with Cora. She fears telling anyone within the tight circle of her family and friends the depth of her postpartum depression. Cynthia connives to trap Marco on the deck for sex so that her husband can tape the whole thing, although Cynthia never mentions the video recording equipment. Through the character of Detective Rasbach whose job it is to uncover the truth, Lapena insists on the moral rightness of truth. Lenape encourages the reader to take a cue from Rasbach’s growing skepticism over whether anyone in the family is capable of telling the truth and remain suspicious of all characters as the drama unfolds. Unlike the family members, Rasbach has no agenda beyond discovering the truth, and so is the best arbiter of honesty in the novel.

Given the number of characters who freely deal in half-truths or outright lies, Anne’s heartbreaking confession to Rasbach that she in fact killed Cora becomes tragically ironic. The novel’s sole gesture of authentic confession becomes an empty one, largely because Lapena has already revealed to the reader that Anne has nothing to do with the kidnapping and Cora is, as far as Marco knows, quite alive.

Characters lie, characters bury secrets in sealed files, characters pretend to be someone they are not, and characters smash mirrors and drink wine when the truth ventures too close. By contrast Cynthia, with her collection of expensive cameras, weaponizes truth to destroy the peace of mind (and drain the bank accounts) of others. It is only in the last ten pages that, one by one, the lies are shattered, truths are revealed, and deceptions are at last ended. However, Lapena concludes the novel by insisting on the difficulty of determining objective truths. The brutal killing of Cynthia by Anne—who blacks out and is ambivalently accountable—leaves the novel within the same miasmic fog of half-truths.