Book Review: "We Keep the Dead Close" by Becky Cooper
“We Keep the Dead Close” by Becky Cooper
Synopsis: 1969: the height of counterculture and the year universities would seek to curb the unruly spectacle of student protest; the winter that Harvard University would begin the tumultuous process of merging with Radcliffe, its all-female sister school; and the year that Jane Britton, an ambitious twenty-three-year-old graduate student in Harvard's Anthropology Department and daughter of Radcliffe Vice President J. Boyd Britton, would be found bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment. Forty years later, Becky Cooper a curious undergrad, will hear the first whispers of the story. In the first telling the body was nameless. The story was this: a Harvard student had had an affair with her professor, and the professor had murdered her in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology because she'd threatened to talk about the affair. Though the rumor proves false, the story that unfolds, one that Cooper will follow for ten years, is even more complex: a tale of gender inequality in academia, a 'cowboy culture' among empowered male elites, the silencing effect of institutions, and our compulsion to rewrite the stories of female victims. We Keep the Dead Close is a memoir of mirrors, misogyny, and murder. It is at once a rumination on the violence and oppression that rules our revered institutions, a ghost story reflecting one young woman's past onto another's present, and a love story for a girl who was lost to history.
Rating (out of 5): 4
Review: While I love to read a murder mystery, and love watching true crime shows, I’ve never been much for true crime novels. To generalize, they’re often pulpy and sensationalize something truly tragic in a way that doesn’t sit well with me. However, I’d been reading raves about this book, and waited out a very long library hold to get it!
The crime at the center of the novel is brutal, and the amount of time that it went unsolved heightens the mystery, and the lore surrounding it at Harvard. Cooper is told of the crime as an undergrad, and it is relayed with the kind of lurid detail of an urban legend. A professor still at Harvard is the alleged perpetrator in this legend.
It is really difficult to write a review of a true crime book without any spoilers, so please note that light spoilers are below (this will not be new information to anyone who Wikipedias the crime). My main issue with the book is the discomfort I felt at the aspersions being cast on suspects both living and dead. I think this is at the crux of every crime story, but knowing that this crime was a random act of violence lent a more lurid quality to Cooper’s speculation.
The book closely focuses on misogyny in academia. The extent to which women were subjugated, dismissed, and outright thwarted shouldn’t be surprising to any of us, but still managed to shock and upset me. The framing of the book around this issue, however, leads to a break in the narrative. Again, this is another issue with the crime being solved as the book was written: the story gels better if someone who knew Britton was her killer. Instead we’re left with a lengthy narrative that doesn’t serve the shocking randomness of the crime.
Despite this criticism, I really enjoyed the book. It’s lengthy but the story is fascinating and compelling. It is written with a great deal of respect for, and interest in, the life of Jane Britton. This is perhaps the part of the book I liked best: the construction of a brilliant but complicated woman whose life was cut far too short.
TL;DR: A really interesting and meticulously researched true crime book that is spectacularly well-written. Not without fault, but certainly worth your time!
If you liked this, try:
“The Stranger Beside Me” by Ann Rule (Bookshop | Kindle)
“The Third Rainbow Girl” by Emma Copley Eisenberg (Bookshop | Kindle)
“After the Eclipse” by Sarah Perry (Bookshop | Kindle)
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