Book Review: The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn
Alice Lynch//Blog Writer
It isn’t often that a book can keep you up through the night. It’s even rarer that it keeps you up through the next, or the next, or the next. But A. J. Finn’s debut novel, The Woman in the Window, is a gripping psychological thriller that does just this: even after you peel through all 427 pages in a frenzy, the story doesn’t leave you. A newcomer to the fiction game, Finn masterfully weaves a Hitchcockian epic that forces you to question everything – including yourself.
The novel centers around isolated protagonist Anna Fox, an ex-therapist trapped in her own home by a nasty wine habit, pill abuse, and a crippling case of agoraphobia. Separated from her husband and daughter, all she has to get her through each day is her collection of classic films (hello, Casablanca) and the scattered windows in her apartment through which she can spy on her neighbors. Life for Anna is numbingly repetitive – until she witnesses something in a neighbor’s home that changes everything. With no one to turn to and her own sanity in question, Anna and the reader are left unsure of who to trust and what to believe.
Building a story around an unreliable narrator is a tricky business. How do you balance obscuring the truth from the reader while also making sure they stay invested in your protagonist? This is where Finn shines: Anna isn’t perfect – far from it – but her self-awareness and determination to find answers to her questions make her accessible. She doesn’t blindly assume that she’s correct, but rather acknowledges her shortcomings and fights to be better than she is. You feel her pain along the way and come to question your own interpretation of Finn’s writing, Anna’s self-doubt mingling with your own impressions. Finn’s usage of first-person POV is also inspired; you know nothing more nor less than Anna, so you’re forced to connect with her and put together the pieces by her side.
Finn also does excellent work in his portrayal of mental illness and its impact on the afflicted’s interpersonal relationships. Anna is a study in irony, an agoraphobic therapist who offers counsel on an online agoraphobia-centered forum. Finn neither glamorizes her condition nor pities Anna; her personal struggles are placed front and center for the sake of the plot, but accented by delicate touches of normalcy. Anna has hobbies and passions, likes and dislikes, desires and dreams. One of the more notable scenes involve a messy sexual encounter in her daughter’s bedroom, long since abandoned. “I’m in my daughter’s bed,” Anna muses, “her blankets wrapped around my naked body, her pillow dry with the sweat of a man I barely know.” The image of pony-covered sheets tangled by her feet is both funny and deeply sad, and that’s the real heart of the story. With her husband and daughter away, Anna struggles to connect with the few people still in her orbit. It’s easier for her to watch the relationships of others through her dark windows, through her television screen, through the anonymous veil granted by the agoraphobia chat room she monitors. It is this propensity to embed herself in a fictional world that becomes the crux of the conflict: what did she really see happen to her neighbor and what is a figment of her desperate imagination?
Finn’s Woman in the Window sold both movie rights and foreign rights before its publication, and not by accident. The novel isn’t perfect – some of the minor arcs are rushed, some of the character development feels sporadic, and the final climax seems to escalate faster than the eye can follow. But for a first novel, and in a tricky genre at that, Woman in the Window is a testament to Finn’s natural instinct for fiction. The story wraps itself around you like an old childhood blanket and holds you tight, but by the tale’s end, you just may find yourself scrambling to hide under the covers.