Sharp, funny, and impossible to put down, Teddy Wayne’s domestic thriller skewers privilege, ambition, and the dangerous belief that smart people can talk their way out of anything.
Steven Hammer is an aging literary wunderkind; exactly the kind of educated, affluent, verbally gifted Brooklyner who believes he is the smartest guy in the room. There has been a family tragedy on vacation. The detectives have questions. And so did I! Here are my real-time annotations made as the investigation unfolds.
The Novel: “The detective’s tone was no longer lighthearted…These weren’t just ‘a few routine follow-ups.’ They were in a private room. A wall-mounted camera in the corner had a red light on, its unblinking cyclopean eye staring at Steven. This was an interrogation.”
My Note: (Okay. Time to get a lawyer.)
The Novel: “We saw both you and Ms. Ødegaard [the au pair] recently deleted the same app off your phones. We were able to recover them. Would you like to revise your statement?”
My Note: (Oof. OOF! Nothing is ever deleted. Get a lawyer!!)
The Novel: “Now was the time to lawyer up and stop talking. But a guilty person asked for a lawyer, and he wasn’t guilty of anything besides infidelity.”
My Note: (Seriously? No. Get a lawyer!!! NOW!)
Let’s stipulate that people know they should get a lawyer. Steven certainly knew; he was actively thinking about it. And yet he’s still debating bringing counsel to a second round of questioning, ultimately sticking to his belief that only guilty people demand one.
This failure to lawyer up in a thriller usually drives me crazy. But here is the brilliant thing about Teddy Wayne’s The Au Pair: not getting a lawyer is not a plot convenience. It is a character argument. Hammer is smug, defensive, and (partly because he is completely besotted with the au pair) not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. Teddy Wayne drops the perfect line: “At times he thought he would’ve made a good lawyer.” Of course he did.
The Plot: A Study in Marital Decay
The Au Pair is a sharp, funny, genuinely page-turning domestic thriller about a man undone by his own self-regard. It is the perfect beach read. Steven Hammer is a once-celebrated novelist now coasting on fumes: teaching an undergrad workshop, stalled on a third book, financially dependent on his high-powered wife, Lucy.
The New York Times has reappraised his celebrated debut, finding it “overstuffed in ambition and undercooked in execution.” The mortification is complete early: he accidentally streams a phone notification to his writing class in which his wife confirms she has paid his monthly stipend.
It gets worse from there. I stayed up late into the night finishing this book.
When their elderly nanny passes away, Steven hires Astrid, a 24-year-old Norwegian aspiring writer who parades around in cutoffs and miraculously gets his children to eat Norwegian fjord trout with honeyed root vegetables.
Her starry-eyed admiration for his past work instantly reignites both his creative ambitions and his absolutely worst impulses. What could go wrong? When a sudden death during a family vacation puts everyone’s actions under a microscope, The Au Pair shifts into top gear.
What separates this from a standard beach-read thriller is Wayne’s merciless satirical precision. The work is a precise portrait of a privileged New York marriage that is festering with ambient resentment and scorekeeping around money and ambition. Wayne’s prose earns its laughs through sheer dry observation. At one point, Steven reflects on his failing relationship:
“He hunted for a writerly turn of phrase, some inventive metaphor to distinguish the singular nature of their unhappy union from all unhappy unions, perhaps how it had become the kind of marriage where half their dialogue consisted of asking the other to call their misplaced phone.”
The Lawyer He Finally Gets
When Steven does finally get a lawyer, it is almost an afterthought. After Astrid is arrested, Steven panics and calls the only attorney he actually knows: an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles who once handled the film rights for his novel.
That lawyer refers him to a top New York defense attorney (for Astrid, not Steven) and adds a crucial warning: “I strongly advise you to retain your own counsel first. Her attorney’s loyalty is to her, even if you’re paying for him.”
Too financially strapped to afford a prestigious firm, Steven goes online and panic-hires a budget defense attorney. This brings us to the book’s best character: Haywood Gradinger.
Gradinger is a rumpled, cigarette-reeking, scraggly-haired sixty-something in an off-the-rack suit. A former prosecutor who knows the DA’s office, he serves as the perfect unvarnished foil to Steven’s literary pretension. When prepping Steven for testimony, Steven describes his affair using the high-flown language of a literary intellectual, calling it an “illicit liaison” of a “clandestine nature.”
The lawyer cuts him off with devilishly funny yet spot on legal advice:
“Just use regular words. A witness who sounds like a thesaurus looks like he’s hiding something. You sound like you were plotting a murder in a castle.”
Gradinger also delivers the classic defense lawyer mantra: “I never ask my client if they did it. Not even if I got them off. Ignorance is bliss.”
He understands what Steven refuses to accept: the legal system does not care about your metaphors, your vocabulary, or your artistic sensibilities. And when Steven, at a critical moment, makes a decision that cannot be undone, Gradinger bluntly and definitively tells him exactly that: “You can’t unring that bell.”
Wayne is also dead on with the evidentiary mechanics. When Steven’s novel is introduced at trial, the judge has to rule on its probative value; whether what’s on the page is substantially outweighed by unfair prejudice to the defendant. The judge admits it for a limited purpose only, instructing the jury it may not be used as character or propensity evidence. For readers who love a good evidentiary ruling (you know who you are), this is deeply satisfying.
The Satirist Behind the Script
Teddy Wayne has written six previous novels, and he knows the literary world he is skewering here. He also wrote Future Tense, a monthly New York Times column examining cultural and technological anxieties. One memorable installment argued that Donald Trump’s limited but relentlessly repetitive vocabulary (tremendous, beautiful, fake news) succeeded not through eloquence but through repetition. Wayne’s point was simple: persuasion doesn’t always belong to the most sophisticated speaker.
That insight becomes the hidden engine of The Au Pair. Steven Hammer suffers from the literary intellectual’s delusion that the right metaphor or “writerly turn of phrase” can explain away almost anything. His lawyer understands the opposite. The legal system has little use for verbal gymnastics. It rewards plain answers, not elegant prose. Hammer’s greatest strength, his command of language, becomes the very thing that undermines him.
He possesses an arrogant, genuine belief that if he can just craft a sophisticated enough narrative with the right “writerly turns of phrase,” he can talk his way out of his legal liability. When Gradinger tells him to stop sounding like a thesaurus, he is trying to drag Hammer out of his MFA cloud. The legal system doesn’t want a literary masterpiece; it wants plain, unadorned truth. Hammer’s prized superpower — his verbal dexterity — is the exact thing that seals his fate.
What makes the legal precision of The Au Pair so deeply satisfying is that Wayne isn’t a lawyer himself. In a Hobart Pulp interview regarding his procedural writing process for his previous thriller, The Winner, Wayne explained that to ensure the mechanics were accurate, he frequently texted with an NYPD detective, consulted an assistant district attorney about criminal procedures, and leaned on his lawyer sister-in-law to capture the mundane realities of the legal profession. That exact dedication carries over here; the procedural scaffolding feels entirely lived-in.
The meta-pleasure of The Au Pair is that Wayne is a literary novelist writing about a failed literary novelist. By grounding Steven’s legal downfall entirely in his own writerly pride, Wayne ensures the courtroom mechanics never feel like a convenient plot device..
The law isn’t there to wrap up the story. It is the immovable object that crushes a man who believes his intellect makes him untouchable. Wayne’s achievement is writing an engrossing thriller that recognizes that the law has little patience for eloquence. Courtrooms reward clarity, not cleverness.
Which brings us back to where we started. If detectives ask you to answer “just a few questions,” get a lawyer. No, seriously. Get a lawyer.
Fine Print: The Au Pair by Teddy Wayne is published by Harper (June 2025). I received an advance copy via NetGalley.