Invisible Girl: A Novel

“I don’t know if it’s anything, but there’s a man, across the street. At number twelve. My daughter says he followed her home the other night. And she says he was staring at her and Tilly strangely on their way home from school last night. I don’t know his name. I’m afraid. He’s about thirty or forty. That’s all I know. Sorry. Just a thought. Number twelve. Thank you.”

Cate’s call to the police contributes to the cycle of gossip and misinformation in the suburban neighborhood, highlighting a pattern of distrust of people who appear different. Traditionally, the domestic noir genre incorporates elements of gossip and suspicion within a domestic community to fuel narrative suspense and create dramatic tension.

“As she passes the tube station her eye is caught by a poster for the local newssheet, the Hampstead Voice: SEX ATTACK IN BROAD DAYLIGHT. She stops, stares at the words, the adrenaline still fizzing through her veins. She wonders for a moment if the headline is from a parallel reality, where she stayed too long in the place that was telling her to go, whether if she reads the article, she will discover that it was her, Cate Fours, fifty-year-old mother of two, brutalized on a desolate 1970s council estate, unable to explain what she had been doing wandering there alone in the middle of the day.”

Cate’s morbid fantasy shows the depth of her preoccupation and obsession with the sexual attacks. Through Cate’s anxiety, Jewell highlights how Cate hyper fixates on the sex attacks in her area to distract herself from her marriage problems, adding to the suspense when these two plot points converge.

“Roan good. Cate bad. But since moving to Hampstead, she’s not so sure anymore. Roan’s behavior had been strange. For months. He had come home late and been distracted and impatient with her and the children. He had cancelled family plans at short notice, often without a reasonable explanation. He had taken whispered calls on his mobile phone behind locked doors and out on the street. There’d been something. Definitely. Something.”

Due to Roan’s emotional abuse, Cate’s initial instinct is to self-flagellate over reading Roan’s patient’s files. However, as Cate becomes more in tune with her instincts, she realizes the discrepancies in this belief system and finds herself able to consider the ways in which Roan’s behavior validates her suspicion and instinctual distrust.

“Then he turns his attention back to the screen and scrolls to the bottom of the article, to the comments. Owen loves the comments, the gray places where the dusty trolls live; he loves to see how low some people will stoop. To get the endorphin rush of a reaction. He’s been known to do it himself on occasion. It can feel like sport at the time, though afterward he feels pathetic remorse. What has he contributed to the great vibrant soup of humanity? Nothing whatsoever.”

This quote highlights the discourse critiquing social media for its ability to morph reality and allow people to act on destructive or hateful impulses from the safety of their online anonymity. Owen’s admission that he writes hateful comments online to get a reaction out of people highlights The Psychological Impact of Loneliness, both for Owen himself (and other internet bullies) and for those he trolls. Although Owen sometimes feels remorse for this behavior, he continues engaging in it because he feels desperate for attention from and connection to someone, even if that attention is negative.

“But mainly, he’s angry at women. Stacys and Beckys as he refers to them. Stacys are the high-value women, the trophy women, the women who can have any man they want. These women sicken him because they know exactly what they’re doing; they know their power and their worth and use it deliberately to make guys like YourLoss feel worthless. Beckys are less attractive women who still feel they have the right to reject men like YourLoss whom they deem to be not up to scratch.”

In detailing Bryn’s perspective on women, Jewell unpacks the ways in which he—and other incels—take the hurt and rejection they feel from women and weaponize it against them, blaming the women for their own feelings of inadequacy and discontent. Bryn reduces all women into two archetypal categories that Owen feels drawn to at first because, like Bryn, he finds it easier to blame women than to do the work of interrogating his own behavior, trauma and loneliness.

“It’s a conspiracy. And I’m not some nutjob conspiracy theorist. I promise you that. But this, the shit that guys like you and me have to deal with. It’s a conspiracy. Full-blown. End of. They call us ‘incels.’ […] like it’s just bad luck. You know. Like there’s nothing anyone can do about it. But that’s the thing, Owen. They are doing this to us—deliberately. The media are doing this to us. And they’ve got the liberals and the feminists eating out of their hands.”

Bryn’s perspective on the way the world works highlight The Disconnect Between Perception and Reality—through his lens of isolation and misogyny, the world appears to Bryn as one big conspiracy against him in stark contrast to the reality. Bryn contradicts himself in the opening lines of his manifesto by saying he is not a conspiracy theorist, then launches into a conspiracy theory, underscoring his skewed perspective.

“‘I can’t live without you. You know that, don’t you? I can’t live without us.’ Then he’d started to cry, properly, contrite shoulder blades heaving up and down like pistons. The horror of it, she recalled now, the shock. For a moment she’d wondered if she even loved him, if she’d ever loved him. ‘I’d die without you,’ he’d said as she passed him a tissue. ‘I’d literally just die.’”

Cate’s flashback to when she confronted Roan on his affair at the beginning of their marriage sheds light on Roan’s pattern of manipulation and emotional abuse. By crying and telling her that he would rather die than be with her, Roan plays on Cate’s sympathy and desire to maintain the life they’ve built together. Cate caves to this display when she is younger because she does not have the life experience to recognize Roan’s manipulation for what it is. Jewell uses this flashback to foreshadow Roan’s infidelity in the novel and Cate’s growth as a character when she stands up to Roan and decides to leave him.

“But in retrospect she could see that he’d been clawing back the moral high ground from her after twenty-five years, expunging his own memories for the crying, pathetic, desperate man in the scruffy flat in Kilburn claiming he’d kill himself if she left him. Maybe he’d known that Cate had questioned her own love for him in that moment. Maybe he’d been waiting for a moment to suggest that he too was capable of questioning his. Redressing the balance.”

In a key moment in her arc, Cate finally acknowledges the depth of Roan’s manipulation. She realizes that instead of working to fix their marriage after his infidelity, Roan spends years leveraging Cate’s own insecurities against her so that he can regain the upper hand of power and control in their relationship. Jewell uses these tactics to highlight The Disconnect Between Perception and Reality. As Cate’s arc progresses, she’s able to recognize the differences between the person Roan appears to be and the person he actually is.

“As she does so, something occurs to her: Molly’s card is not the same shape as the envelope. It is slightly too tall, not quite wide enough. The card did not come with this envelope. She pulls it out again, opens it, reads it. Little Molly. What a strange little girl she must be, sending Valentine’s cards to old men. She turns the card over in her hands, examining it for something, some tiny thing that might make more sense of it. But there’s nothing. Roan’s job, after all, is the care of strange children; why should she be surprised that one would behave strangely toward him?”

The toxic environment Roan cultivates in his marriage to Cate manipulates her into mistrusting her instincts, even when she sees obvious signs of deception. Cate’s sensitive nature makes her want to please Roan, so she avoids confrontation, resisting anything that will put a strain on their relationship.

“I looked up into the gunpowder-stained night sky, and I searched with my eyes until I found a star—muted and grubby, but there—and I clasped my hands together in a prayer and said, ‘I love you, Granddad. I love you, Grandma. I love you, Mum.’ […] I thought, you see, Roan Fours, I didn’t need you after all. I only needed nature. I only needed owls and foxes and stars and fireworks. I was fixed. Or so I thought.”

Jewell utilizes a motif of foxes throughout the novel to represent healing and self-belief. Saffyre’s moment with the fox by the building site represents an important moment of healing in her grief over losing her family—a grief that Jewell suggests manifests in her fear of abandonment. Saffyre channels her grief into her interaction with the fox, anthropomorphizing the animal and allowing her to say goodbye to her family.

“Owen sits back, folds his arms around his stomach, and rocks slightly. The world feels like a straitjacket, sucking all the air out of his chest cavity, squeezing his bones. He looks at people out of the window: normal people doing normal things. Walking to the shops. Going to work. Being normal suddenly looks like the most alien concept in the world, something he can barely conceive of.”

Jewell uses the simile of a straitjacket to emphasize the physical manifestation of Owen’s emotional distress as police close in on him. Jewell’s plot sets up the progression of events that have led Owen to a place where he feels completely out of control, knowing that things do not look good for him and wishing that he could changes things—a crossroads moment in Owen’s character arc.

“She feels a weight lift from her gut, a weight she had barely acknowledged until now: the weight of doubt, the weight of suspicion, of thinking that at any moment now the world would collapse on her head.”

As Cate becomes more in tune with her instincts, she has the sudden realization that her instincts about Roan’s behavior are correct. By acknowledging the validity of her fears, Cate frees herself to trust to her own instincts warning her about Roan. While Cate’s instincts are not infallible (her suspicions that Owen is guilty of kidnapping Saffyre turn out to be wrong), her ability to finally view Roan with clear eyes rather than bending to the weight of his emotional abuse represents an important victory for Cate.

“Owen Picks’ face keeps passing in and out of Cate’s consciousness. That vaguely displeased look he has about him, as though he’s constantly thinking about unsavory things. His hair with that slightly defeated, secondhand look about it. The worn-down shoes, incongruous in contrast with strangely smart clothes that look as though they don’t come naturally to him. He looks the type, she thinks. He seems the type: a single guy, living alone with an eccentric aunt in a grubby-looking house with tatty curtains at the windows. And now there is blood under his bedroom window.”

Jewell’s presentation of Owen is a red herring, a literary device mystery writers use to divert the sleuth—and the reader—from identifying the real culprit. Owen’s suspension from work, the misogyny he demonstrates in his identification with the incel community, and the evidence tying him to the missing girl are designed to make him appear to be the perpetrator. Focusing on Owen allows the true criminal to remain concealed.

“They exchange a look. Cate knows they’re both thinking the same thing. Saffyre Maddox might be dead and their neighbor, who might have killed her, could have killed Georgia, too. But now the police have him in custody and they are safe: they are making a cake.”

In the wake of Owen’s arrest, Georgia and Cate turn to act of domestic normalcy—baking a cake—to try and restore their sense of safety. Jewell’s use of this imagery highlights a key trope of domestic noir: the ways the appearance of safety projected by white, middle-class, suburban life doesn’t necessarily align with the reality.

“She thinks about how guilty she’d felt after sending the police to Owen Picks’ door those weeks earlier. But she’d been right, she thinks to herself now, she’d followed her instincts and her instincts had been absolutely spot-on.”

Although Cate’s belief that Owen kidnapped Saffyre ultimately turns out to be wrong, her wariness of his behavior is validated by his pattern of sexual harassment and participation in misogynist online forums—validation that allows her to have a breakthrough in her own character arc, reinforcing her confidence and trust in her own instincts about Roan. This realization fuels Cate’s final character development, catalyzing her decision to end her marriage.

“I know why Aaron bought me the kitten. I’m not stupid, and it was pretty obvious. He bought me the kitten to make me want to stay home. I knew he was uncomfortable about the amount of time I was spending outside the flat, and he’s not stupid either. It was kind of genius. Because how could I want to be hanging round outside on my own in the dark and the cold and the wet when I could be cuddled up with Angelo, the kitten of my dreams? […] But he wasn’t enough, not enough to stop me wanting to go out, pull up my hood, and disappear in plain sight.”

Saffyre sees her desire to become invisible, stalk people, and forget about her problems as a necessary survival tactic because she’s not yet ready to confront her trauma, highlighting the novel’s thematic engagement with Invisibility as Both Self-Protective and Disempowering. Jewell uses the gift of the kitten to reinforce Saffyre’s connection to animals and nature—the thing that ultimately facilitates her healing process—as well as her connection to Uncle Aaron.

“This time next year the skinny wife would be living in some shit flat somewhere because it would be all she could afford, and his kids would have to shuttle back and forth between two shit flats and sit making awkward conversations with Alicia and looking after their mum because her heart would be broken and she wouldn’t be the mum they knew anymore, she’d be a new mum, and their childhoods would be shattered and changed.”

Through Saffyre’s narrative point of view, Jewell centers Cate in the narrative of Roan’s infidelity rather than Roan himself. As Saffyre imagines the possible implications of Roan’s affair, she focuses on what will happen to Cate and his children. Saffyre’s empathy for Cate suggests that while Roan sees his affairs as instant gratification, Saffyre sees the real-life consequences for his actions on his family.

“The night after that I slept at home, just for Aaron’s sake, not for my own, but my soul ached at being trapped indoors. I felt swallowed up by my mattress, my duvet, the warm air swirling around me. I felt claustrophobic, anxious; the sheets were twisted around my legs when I woke up the next morning, and for a minute I thought I was paralyzed.”

Saffyre’s experience of feeling trapped in her bed reveals the impact of her sexual trauma. Jewell foreshadows the role that Saffyre’s connection to the natural world will play in her healing by asserting early in the narrative that Saffyre feels safer sleeping outside. Saffyre’s trauma manifests itself in claustrophobia and anxiety inside her house, so she chooses to wander at night, which gives her a sense of autonomy.

“School had started back on 7 January, and I had gone back to being the ‘other’ Saffyre Maddox, the one who showed up in the classroom every morning clean and fresh, hair neatly tied back, some mascara, some lip gloss. […] So, I did my schoolwork. […] By day I was Saffyre Maddox, aloof but popular, mild-mannered A-grad student. By night I was a kind of nocturnal animal, like the human equivalent of a fox. My superpower was invisibility. […] I was the Invisible Girl. Invisibility was my favorite state of existence.”

In the wake of her trauma, Saffyre divides her life into two versions of herself, revealing her inner turmoil. While Saffyre knows how to put on the persona of normalcy, internally she is suffering. Saffyre constructs the persona of “Invisible Girl” to restore her sense of control over her own life and give her a sense of power rather than helplessness. Saffyre uses this state of invisibility to numb her feelings, rather than facing her trauma, pointing to Jewell’s portrayal of Invisibility as Both Self-Protective and Disempowering.

“The thought of him out there now, just being able to go where he wanted and do what he wanted. And that was the root of it really. That was what turned my head from self-harm to Harrison-harm. I felt like we were occupying the same territory, the same ground. We were both invisible, but we’d seen each other, like two foxes facing off in the muted streetlight. I thought, I do not want to hurt myself anymore because of what this person did to me. I thought, I want to hurt him.”

As Saffyre finally faces her trauma and abuser, she shifts her posture from fear to anger. Saffyre feels struck by the injustice of Harrison’s freedom and she decides to use her persona as “Invisible Girl” to punish him, proving she is not helpless anymore.

“Owen feels a familiar tug of anger in his chest. But he quells it, breathes in hard. He turns and he engages Gina properly, in a way in which he has rarely engaged a woman, with clear eyes and an open heart, and he says, ‘You’re right Gina. I totally understand what you’re saying. I’ve been far from the best version of myself over the years, and I take my share of the blame for everything that’s happened to me. But this, what I’ve just been through, it’s changed me. I don’t want to be that person anymore. I’m going to work on myself.’”

In the novel’s resolution, Jewell completes Owen’s character arc with his decision to make personal changes after the police exonerate him. He finally takes responsibility for his actions and resolves to take concrete steps toward changing his behavior for the better. This moment is the first step for Owen away from incel culture and toward genuine, meaningful connection and community.

“But there was something stone-cold terrifying about the look on Roan’s face as he hit Alicia, this man whose job it was to cure people. Just like Josh had said that night when we first got chatting: how did a man with a job like his reconcile himself to causing pain to people he loved on a daily basis?”

The difficulty Saffyre experiences reconciling Roan’s vocation and his behavior toward women highlights The Disconnect Between Perception and Reality. As Saffyre observes Roan’s face when he hits Alicia, she recognizes why she has always instinctually held back from trusting him fully. The encounter forces Saffyre to confront the fact that Roan is not the trustworthy person that she once thought he was.

“He’s one of those guys, you know? One of those guys that nothing would surprise you about, not really, if you actually stopped and thought about it. If you looked behind the mask. That he might actually be the bad guy, not the good guy. That he might not be the savior. […] He might be the predator.”

Alicia’s warning about Roan reinforces the central dramatic tension of Jewell’s novel: Sometimes the worst predators hide in plain sight. After Saffyre sees Roan’s mask of normalcy slip, she realizes that he is not the compassionate psychiatrist that she thought he was. Instead, Roan uses this persona as a ploy to draw people in before taking advantage of them.