An Extraordinary New Book Dismantles the Myths That Surround Domestic Violence

In secret, Michelle took classes and planned an escape. She ran away only to return, filed charges only to recant — behavior that might look weak or mystifying, but Snyder reveals how carefully she was trying to assess the risks to her and her children. She was trying to placate Rocky until she felt safe enough to make a move. She was relying on the tools that had kept her alive.

We meet others making these terrifying calculations. Snyder travels to shelters and along with the police. She encounters so many women, so many hollow-eyed children. There’s an immediacy in these scenes, the raw, ragged tension of people exhausted by fear, that recalls Donna Ferrato’s portraits of domestic violence in “Living With the Enemy.” I read Snyder’s book as if possessed, stopping for nothing, feeling the pulse beat in my brain.

What did I miss? What could I have done? Michelle and Rocky’s parents churn over these questions obsessively. Snyder wants us to share in them, make them our own. There is so much that can be done; for all the suffering in the book, it is also full of actionable changes.

Domestic violence initiatives, after all, are fairly new in this country; until the 1990s, we had more animal shelters than women’s shelters. Snyder takes us through the history — how the O.J. Simpson trial and the passage of the Violence Against Women Act, in 1994, transformed the understanding of domestic violence — and up to the series of steps that can save lives today. Prosecute cases without the victim’s help, as we do murder trials. Treat restraining orders like D.U.I.s and keep them on file, even after they have expired. Train clergy members and doctors to recognize and respond to domestic violence. Promote battering intervention programs. Choking nearly always precedes a homicide attempt; teach police to recognize the signs, and instruct doctors to assess women for traumatic brain injury. And, of course, there is the near-unanimous recommendation from law enforcement and domestic violence advocates: “You want to get rid of homicide?” a retired forensic nurse asks. “Get rid of guns.”

In its scope and seriousness — its palpable desire to spur change — this book invites reflection not only about violence but about writing itself. What kinds of reportage really move policy? What kinds of narrative — what sorts of tone, structure, examples — can stoke a reader’s outrage and then translate that outrage into action, keeping it from curdling into cynicism or despair?

This is the interesting paradox of this particular genre. Books that want to raise an alarm don’t always aspire to literature, but to be effective — to persuade — they must be literary; they must be obsessed with matters of rhythm, form and language. “Silent Spring” is a toxicological examination of 19 chemicals, but we recall it for its beauty and precision, for its eerie prelude, in which Rachel Carson conjures a poisoned, silent world that once “throbbed” with the music of birds.

Snyder is the author of a study on the costs of fast fashion, “Fugitive Denim,” and a novel, “What We’ve Lost Is Nothing.” She brings all of fiction’s techniques to this new book — canny pacing, an eye for the animating detail and bursts of quick, confident characterization. There is a fullness and density to every one of her subjects — the former prison guard turned restorative justice advocate, the notorious pimp who now holds antiviolence classes for abusers. She glides from history to the present day, from scene to analysis, with a relaxed virtuosity that filled me with admiration. This is a writer using every tool at her disposal to make this story come alive, to make it matter.