The Perfect Nanny

Beginning a novel called The Perfect Nanny with the sentence "The baby is dead" takes a certain amount of daring. Yes, there's a spoiler on the first page of this intriguing but ultimately mystifying novel by Leila Slimani, translated from the French by Sam Taylor. A nanny, at first thought to be perfect, ends up killing two children. What drove her to it?

From that stark opening, we flashback to how a couple, Paul and Myriam, come to hire Louise. Myriam has gone back to work as a lawyer, and after interviewing a few candidates, settle on Louise, who seems to good to be true: "Everyone in Paul and Myriam’s inner circle ends up knowing about Louise. Some of them have seen her in the neighborhood or in the apartment. Others have only heard about the feats of this legendary nanny, who seems to have sprung straight from the pages of a children’s book." The couple start thinking of her as part of the family.

But in other passages, we see Louise's dark history--a daughter of her own that is estranged, and a lonely life of quiet desperation, where she seems right with the children. Eventually her odd behavior will start to grate on the couple, but they don't anticipate her final action.

The story is told from many oblique angles, such as her daughter: "She wished she could make her understand how humiliating and exhausting it was bringing up a daughter like her. She wished she could rub Stéphanie’s nose in her sweat and her anxieties, could wipe that stupid, carefree smile off her face. She wanted to rip apart what remained of her childhood," a nosy neighbor, a child who used to be watched by her. She avoids most of the other nannies, but does make a friend, Wafa, who is North African. We only get fragments of her trial, or of the police investigation. The story's incompleteness is in itself a part of its whole.

But what is The Perfect Nanny really about? Slimani is French-Moroccan, and Myriam is Moroccan as well. Is this a comment on classism? That Louise is a white nanny is something of an outlier, as almost all of the nannies in Paris are not (just as they are not in most major cities around the world). Women of color have been raising white children for ages, just look at the the American south. But if there was a point to be had, I didn't get it. To me, The Perfect Nanny exists on its own, as a horror story of sorts. I think if I had kids it would put me off hiring a nanny.