The Woman in the Window, by A.J. Finn | Review

An unconventional and clever modern thriller.

‘Locked-in syndrome. Causes include stroke, brain stem injury, MS, even poison. It’s a neurological condition, in other words, not a psychological one. Yet here I am, literally locked indoors closed, windows shut, while I shy and shrink from the light.’

Stephen King has called The Woman in the Window ‘unputdownable’ and many fellow readers of A.J. Finn’s debut wholeheartedly agree. The novel’s appeal as a thriller is not conventional, with fewer twists and turns with each chapter than many other books of the genre. Instead, Finn takes you on a much more complex and psychological journey.

The novel shimmers with intrigue and subtlety, encapsulated by a fascinating protagonist in Dr Anna Fox. The prose is succinct and incisively purposeful. As Joyce Carol Oates has written for The New Yorker, ‘We get very short chapters and a preponderance of single-sentence paragraphs, in cinematic present-tense prose that seems to teeter breathlessly on stiletto heels.’

Finn takes us inside the mind of Anna, who has not left her Harlem brownstone home for nearly a year because she suffers from agoraphobia, an anxiety disorder characterised by symptoms of anxiety in situations where the person perceives their environment to be unsafe with no easy way to escape. She lives alone and copes with her condition by watching noir movies, playing chess online and drinking a dangerous volume of red wine mixed with her medication.

Significantly, Anna uses a Nikon camera to document her neighbours’ activities and knows of secrets which have not yet been uncovered in those respective households. Her situation is curious, and she barely even encounters the tenant who lives in her basement flat. Anna regularly speaks to her estranged husband and daughter, and we continually wonder what happened in the past to leave her in such solitude.

Anna is a likeable narrator who garners our sympathy right away. We find compassion for Anna because she is self-loathing and has an exaggerated sole responsibility for the situation she finds herself in. As we become more acquainted with her, we are confronted by a multitude of questions: what sparked Anna’s agoraphobia? Why does she spy on her neighbours? When will she have the courage to go outside? Why is she estranged from her husband and daughter? Is she a reliable narrator?

In questioning Anna’s reliability, we uncover the alluring kernel of the story. Through Anna’s isolation from the outside world and her moments of dizzying anxiety, we start to doubt whether we can believe her accounting of events. This culminates in the critical moment when she witnesses a murder at the house of her new neighbours across the park. Anna witnesses a woman stabbed through the window and is stunned, failing to even take a photo on her Nikon. Immediately, Anna is confused, disoriented and frightened. Most importantly, she has no physical evidence of the murder.

Essentially, from this moment Anna is forever playing catch-up in a race to convince the people around her, including us, the reader, that what she saw ever happened. As Constance Grady has written, ‘you’re impatient for Anna to catch up to your omniscience and put together the pieces so she can see who’s been lying to her the whole time.’ Finn deserves praise for this because it is a daring technique to employ and makes us question our role as the reader, demanding us to critically judge our protagonist.

The idea of Anna being in no fit state to solve a murder case purely because she has not yet come to terms with her past piques our fascination and is central to our understanding of how the novel unfolds. Oates expands on this idea in The New Yorker: ‘perhaps this is why a protagonist who is preoccupied with a mystery is so slow to figure out an explanation that will long have been obvious to readers.’ Although the explanation is ‘obvious’ to an extent, the climactic finale still delivers a stunning twist, satisfyingly rounding off the suspense which has accelerated since Anna became ostracised and distrusted by those around her.

Whether the denouement of The Woman in the Window is blindingly obvious or not, it has not averted the widespread critical acclaim for the novel. Grady sees the advent in Finn’s more contemplative approach in depicting Anna’s character: ‘you’ll see the big reveal coming from a mile away, but it’s far, far more compelling on the page than any of the creepy jump scares that power murder mystery.’ Grady concludes: ‘The predictability isn’t all that bad: Part of the pleasure of this kind of book is observing an effective formula well-executed. And The Woman in the Window executes the formula it’s set out for itself with as much panache as any mad scientist. This is a book you can eat like candy.’

Finn’s first book is exceptionally readable and thought-provoking. The paranoia encapsulated by Anna permeates throughout and keeps us gripped, not through trepidation but more through chilling fascination. Lloyd Sachs has captured the essence of the novel’s appeal nicely in The Chicago Tribune: ‘for all the narrative effects, Finn never loses touch with the fear and insecurity of a woman who has suffered a great loss and feels abandoned and alone in the world.’

We do not have much time to be fearful of the unravelling of the truth in The Woman in the Window because the pages seamlessly fly past. Instead, thee burden falls upon Anna herself, who must come to terms with her haunting past before she can possess the courage required to solve a murder which took place in front of her very eyes.

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