Janeology: A Review

The recent headlines in newspapers and on cable news shows regarding Casey Anthony, the Orlando woman accused of murdering her three year old daughter Caylee, bring back haunting memories of other headlines from previous years of mothers accused of killing their children. Andrea Yates, a Houston woman, drowned her five children in a bathtub on 20 June 2001. Susan Smith of Union, South Carolina, rolled her Mazda Protégé into John D. Long Lake in October 1994 with her three year old and fourteen month old sons locked in the back seat.

Questions surface in the national discussion after episodes like these occur. What kind of a monster is able to kill her children? What could possibly have driven her to such an act? Why did she have to take the lives of innocent kids?

Each case has its own answers. Anthony, who is still presumed innocent pending trial, presents the profile of a woman who enjoyed the party scene and may have considered a child as a hindrance in her pursuit of that lifestyle. Smith apparently sought a relationship with a wealthy local businessman who had no interest in an entangling family. Yates suffered mental illness due to severe post-partum depression, according to the verdict at her appellate trial.

But is there anything that weaves the cases of these women together, some common causality that drove them to commit their horrendous crimes? Is there a pattern that lies behind the obvious illness each woman suffered?

These questions have intrigued Karen Harrington, a Texas native and mother of two daughters. The result of her ponderings is her debut novel, Janeology.

In her story, Jane Nelson, wife of Tom and mother of twins Simon and Sarah, snaps one fine Texas morning and drowns the twins in the kitchen sink. Sarah fortunately survives the episode, while Simon does not. Jane is brought to trial and found not guilty by reason of insanity. All of this is revealed and disposed of in the first two dozen pages of the book. Commendably, Harrington does not dwell on the unsavory and shocking crime itself. She is more concerned with the “why” behind it.

Around a year after the “not guilty” verdict is handed over, the prosecutor’s office prefers charges against Jane’s husband Tom for child endangerment and neglect. He certainly should have known that his wife was mentally unstable and unfit to be left alone with her children while Tom went off to work as a professor at a local college. It is this turn of events that propels the book into its consideration of the roles of “nature versus nurture” in the development of the mental illness that drove Jane to her crime.

The fundamental questions underlying the novel are articulated by one of the characters late in the story:

“…which came first, motherhood or the insanity? Did having children so overwhelm her that it triggered her madness? If she had been childless, would her latent insanity have stayed a secret? And if that’s true, are there thousands of childless women whose sanity stays in check only because they’ve never owned a Sippy Cup? Chicken/egg? Mother/killer?”

The questions are explored in an unraveling of Jane’s life and that of her immediate ancestors in a series of vignettes that form the core of the book. Harrington does yeoman’s work in peeling back the onion of Jane’s family history through this device, adopting different voices and styles as she probes the murky influences on a seemingly normal, loving wife and mother in contemporary America.

There are no hard and fast answers revealed in Janeology; the superficial reader may be disappointed in the lack of concrete conclusions drawn and tied up neatly with a bow at the end of the story. This perception would be unfortunate. Like all good literature, the journey is worth more than the destination. Harrington pokes the reader into thinking through the story’s issues and drawing his own conclusions.

Janeology has been described as a legal thriller; this overstates the case, as it can be argued that it’s neither a legal story nor a thriller. Rather, it is a quiet, reflective work of psychological inquiry that induces the reader to consider the intricacies of both the human mind and the influence of family on the formation of character and personality. In this work, Karen Harrington succeeds admirably in revealing the depth and development of her two principal characters and displaying her own talent in telling a compelling story in superb fashion.

Janeology is Harrington’s debut novel. This reader is licking his chops at the prospect of reading more of her work in the future.


Janeology, by Karen Harrington. Available in hardcover from Künati, Inc., publishers. 246 pages.


Janeology: A Review
Kenneth M. Rhodes
30 December 2008