Title: The Woman in the Window
Author: AJ Finn
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 427
Price: 399
For a debut novel, The Woman in the Window packs a sucker punch. From the pen name of AJ Finn—who happens to be an executive editor with William Morrow publishers, Daniel Mallory—comes this story which could have been a movie made by Alfred Hitchcock were the celebrated director be alive. A story about an agoraphobic (titular) woman who might or might not have witnessed a crime.
The Woman in the Window reads more like a movie script told from a first-person narrative than a book, but if you get past the mundaneness of the way Anna lives her isolated life in the first 100-odd pages, the book is a thrill-a-coaster all the way.
For connoisseurs of film noirs and black and white thrillers, this is a must-read. This is as much a psychological thriller as much a crime noir because as a reader with all their faculties working, everything is very evident; but not to Anna. Like any suspense thriller worthy of Hitchcock, characters in The Woman in the Window are hardly what they seem, but because the narrative is coming from a woman whom you pity, abhor and are trying to figure out, it makes an engrossing read. Anything else said will be spoiling the drama of the suspense. Thriller read aside, the psychology of an isolated woman, the dynamics of the modern American family, the facades all ‘urbane’ families live by—it’s all touched upon in the book.
“It’s been nearly ten months since I found myself on the streets, or in a car, or in a …”
This is something that Anna Fox, the protagonist of this thriller says to herself in chapter 37 after she discovers a crime that she thinks she has witnessed. She is an alcoholic and a full-time neighbourhood snoop. If she wasn’t suffering from agoraphobia, she could have been the textbook voyeur as well. Anna, however, doesn’t seem to find any pleasure in peeping into others’ lives. Her background as a psychiatrist is probably why she is interested in their lives—to see what makes them tick.
However, this personality also makes her a bit unreliable; readers cannot decide whether to believe her or to chalk it up to her bored imaginative brain. The rest of the book is finding out if what we read really happens or if it happens in Anna’s mind. As the book progresses, you realize that Anna herself is a deeply flawed human being—borderline alcoholism aside—who has made mistakes and doesn’t necessarily learn from them.
The Woman in the Window, Anna Fox paraphrased, is feeling as though we are falling through her mind.
