Review of Must Read Well by Ellen Pall

*Must Read Well* by Ellen Pall (2022). Published by Bancroft Press.

Must Read Well has unearthed a trend when it comes to the books I’ve been reading these days.

Not only do they tend to be set in New York City, but I’ve liked reading about graduate students these days. Maybe it’s because I’m a graduate student myself, but I’ve been very interested in how this particular lifestyle has been depicted in literature and film these days.

Besides that, I was doing my typical weekly act of wandering around my library and seeing what’s new when I saw this was the book on the display in the new fiction section.

I read the cover and decided it was going to be my new weekend read. I ended up finishing it within a day, since it was pretty straightforward writing throughout. My preliminary thoughts is that this isn’t the kind of novel for everyone, especially since it’s a slow burn where nothing really happens.

Onwards with the review!

A broke PhD student finds a Craigslist ad and finds herself in a dangerous game with the source of her research.

Our protagonist in Must Read Well is Liz, who is doing her PhD and has been held back from finishing her dissertation because one of the people behind her research, a writer from the sixties, refused to do interviews or help her out with the research she’s conducting.

Liz is living in New York City, is absolutely broke, and her boyfriend just dumped her, so when she looks at an ad put out by someone asking for an individual who can read well, she looks at the location of the address and realizes that it’s Anne Taussig Weil, the same woman who had denied her an interview for her research.

So she applies for the job, as she sees it as a way to get two different things she wants. She can find a room for dirt cheap in the Village, and, although this can be seriously unethical, she can get closer to the one thing she hasn’t been able to get throughout her research process.

She gets the job and doesn’t disclose who actually is to Anne, and her task is simple. She is to read excerpts of Anne’s journals to her each day.

As it turns out, Anne kept prolific journals throughout her lifetime. The ones she specifically wants Liz to read directly ties into the novel she was famous for, a feminist one that was feminist before that was a bigger concept in the seventies.

And so Liz reads to Anne every single day from her journals, and discovers that Anne was having an affair with a famous musician. Although her home life with her husband, Steve, was good, something just draws her to the guy.

The deeper they get into the journals, the more this becomes clearer this is a game. Anne drops hints that implies she knows exactly who Liz is and why she’s there, but Liz continues to go deeper into this game and play with fire.

The journals reveal that when Anne was seeing him, they end up agreeing to tell their spouses everything. Anne tells her husband, who leaves the home immediately and doesn’t return.

She heads to the hotel where she had agreed to meet the other man, but he never shows up. His wife committed suicide after being told, and he breaks things off, leaving Anne to fend her divorce and then her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s untimely death.

Anne then gets sick and dies. Liz moves out of the apartment, stealing some of the journals to photocopy information, and eventually returns them when visiting the apartment. Anne’s lawyer calls her one day and tells her she is being left an absurd amount of money and told her to keep all the journals.

But when the lawyer leaves the room and Liz opens the paper, reading further, it reveals Anne knew everything and put stipulations. Liz has to publish everything in order to keep the money, or the threat is that if she doesn’t, the lawyer will inform Liz’s PhD committee and school about her ways of getting information and that it wasn’t due to consent. The novel ends there.

Overall Thoughts

This is a fascinating novel, as it’s all about mind games. I could see how the average person could easily get bored with the dynamics depicted throughout, as it’s literally just these two women reading, chatting, and big chunks of journal entries in italics.

I started nodding off at certain sections of the book and was so tempted to skim through them, but I pushed through. There’s a specific audience probably in mind here for this kind of content, and I can see how someone would give up immediately. But the tension was there and I thought this game was well done despite the slow burn element to it.

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