The Domestic Thriller Is Having a Moment

In A. J. Finn’s “The Woman in the Window,” an agoraphobic with a zoom lens thinks she sees something.
In many recent domestic thrillers, the credibility of the female witness is at stake.Illustration by Jeffrey Smith

An archetype, as Mark Twain might have observed, is nothing but a stereotype with a college education. Where modernists and postmodernists boldly plunder the collective treasuries of myth, legend, fairy tales, and art for their own idiosyncratic purposes, commercially minded writers replicate formulaic situations, characters, and plots in order to appeal to a wide audience. The challenge is to invest the generic formula with just enough distinction—what dust-jacket blurbs might praise as “originality”—without leaving formula behind; to fuse the familiar and the unfamiliar while assuring the reader that the ending will be clear, decisive, and consoling in a way that “literary fiction” usually is not.

The Woman in the Window” (Morrow), a highly successful début novel by the pseudonymous A. J. Finn (thirty-eight-year-old Daniel Mallory, a former editor at Morrow), is a superior example of a subset of recent thrillers featuring “unreliable” female protagonists who, despite their considerable handicaps—which may involve alcoholism, drug addiction, paranoia, and even psychosis—manage to persevere and solve mysteries where others have failed. Its title evokes such best-sellers as “The Girl on the Train” and “The Woman in Cabin 10,” not to mention “Gone Girl” (in which the titular girl is the contriver of the mystery), while its frame of reference involves classic American noir films: “Gaslight,” “Vertigo,” “Strangers on a Train,” “Wait Until Dark,” “Sudden Fear,” “Rope,” and, most explicitly, “Rear Window.” Indeed, although the protagonist of “The Woman in the Window,” a thirty-nine-year-old child psychologist named Anna Fox, is wryly self-aware, her mode of narration resembles a film script. 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:

The phone rings.

My head swivels, almost back to front, like an owl, and the camera drops to my lap.

The sound is behind me, but my phone is by my hand.

It’s the landline . . .

It rings again, distant, insistent.

I don’t move. I don’t breathe.

Who’s calling me? No one’s called the house phone in . . .

I can’t remember. Who would even have this number? I can barely remember it myself.

Another ring.

And another.

I shrivel against the glass, wilt there in the cold. I imagine the rooms of my house, one by one, throbbing with that noise.

Another ring.

I look across the park.

Such staccato paragraphs expand “The Woman in the Window” to more than four hundred pages even as they allow those pages to be read and turned in a near-continuous forward motion.

Anna Fox, seemingly estranged from her husband and young daughter, and living alone in a five-story brownstone in a gentrified Manhattan neighborhood, is a sophisticated addition to the sisterhood of impaired and befuddled female protagonists confounded by mysteries erupting in their lives. Since a personally devastating experience some months before, Anna has become cripplingly agoraphobic:

Many of us—the most severely afflicted, the ones grappling with post-traumatic stress disorder—are housebound, hidden from the messy, massy world outside. Some dread the heaving crowds; others, the storm of traffic. For me, it’s the vast skies, the endless horizon, the sheer exposure, the crushing pressure of the outdoors. “Open spaces” the DSM-5 calls it vaguely. . . .

As a doctor, I say that the sufferer seeks an environment she can control. Such is the clinical take. As a sufferer (and that is the word), I say that agoraphobia hasn’t ravaged my life so much as become it.

It is said that most agoraphobics are female and that there are far more of them than statistics suggest. For some, the disorder seems to begin in childhood; for others, like Anna, agoraphobia is a consequence of a traumatic episode or episodes, perhaps exacerbated by guilt and a wish to self-punish.

As in “Rear Window,” the mystery begins when a housebound but sharp-eyed and inquisitive person happens to see, or imagines that she has seen, a murder committed through a neighboring window. Anna, in her quasi-paralysis, has become a shameless voyeur; she has acquired a camera with a powerful zoom lens that apparently allows her not only to spy on lovers next door but to note the very “archipelago of tiny moles trailing across the back” of a beautiful red-haired adulteress. (Her neighbors resent being spied on, but not enough to pull down the blinds.) Anna can even peer some distance into rooms, as in an Edward Hopper painting of preternatural exposure and clarity.

Indeed, “The Woman in the Window” seems set in mid-century small-town America, not in twenty-first-century Manhattan. When Anna summons the police, she is visited by Conrad Little, an affable and loquacious detective, and engages him in TV-style repartee. Following the dictates of the genre, Detective Little does not believe Anna; his cursory investigation doesn’t indicate that any crime has been committed. But, in the manner of a kindly small-town sheriff, he remains indulgent of her and her suspicions.

Anna, when not addressing us in her breathless mode, is engagingly self-doubting and self-loathing, by turns warmly funny and panic-stricken; she’s also an aficionada of the best of Hitchcock and the “Thin Man” movies. She’s a sympathetic, professional woman who views her victimhood as more or less what she deserves (the reader will learn why, eventually), even as she is gamely trying, through therapy, to recover and return to “the light.” Certainly, the novel’s most compelling passages deal not with the “Rear Window”-inflected, credibility-straining mystery unfolding in a brownstone across the way but, rather, with Anna’s sense of herself as a wounded individual, a highly intelligent and educated person who has virtually destroyed her life through a succession of bad decisions. Agoraphobics are inmates in a kind of self-imposed asylum, prevented from escaping by the violent panic attacks that overcome them when they try to step outside:

What would I do if I were on that screen, a character in one of my films? I would leave the house to investigate, like Teresa Wright in Shadow of a Doubt. I would summon a friend, like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. I wouldn’t sit here, in a puddle of robe, wondering where next to turn.

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 in—doors closed, windows shut, while I shy and shrink from the light.

Like its great predecessor Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” the classic tale of the seemingly unreliable female narrator witnessing events she cannot explain or make plausible to others, “The Woman in the Window” presents two mysteries. There’s the film-noir mystery, glimpsed in tantalizing fragments through the window, and there’s the more engrossing, though less explicable, mystery of the witness herself. Is she reliable? Is she sane?

Though the novel provides Anna Fox with a painstakingly stitched backstory that has consequences for the present, she ultimately seems more a function of the plot than a fully realized person, not quite as interesting as her problems. Her interior voice is not especially female; it is, rather, genderless. She appears to possess no physicality, no sexuality, though we’re told that she had a love affair not long ago and, in a brief scene that particularly tests credulity, she sleeps with an ex-convict who has rented her basement apartment. Most improbable, Anna consumes cases of Merlot and an incapacitating quantity of opioids. But 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.

“The Woman in the Window”—in which our suspects are a fixed cast of neighbors in another household—is an updated variant of the locked-room mystery, that reliably entertaining standby. And the mystery, of course, plays by its own strict rules. Of all literary genres, it tends to be the most formulaic, since it presents a succession of episodes that both advance and befuddle the trajectory toward a solution, which must be postponed until the very end of the novel. (In the real world, the first forty-eight hours after a crime are generally considered crucial.) Red herrings—false clues, false leads, false suspects—must be embedded in the narrative, even as the villain hides in plain sight. To accomplish this sleight of hand, it helps to tell the story from the perspective of an individual who is intensely involved in the mystery without having the capacity to comprehend what is happening around her. The reader can thereby identify with the heroine and share in her increasing alarm and helplessness. Such straightforward genre works maintain an implicit contract between reader and author: keep turning pages, don’t slow down to question improbabilities; it will all be explained in the final chapter, often by the villain to the protagonist, who is guaranteed to survive.

If the mystery genre does not abide much reality, it should be recalled that no Shakespearean tragedy or sonnet—no work of art in which the constraints of form are exacting—is likely to withstand the bracing winds of common sense. Still, there are cultural currents to which novels like “The Woman in the Window” are well suited. In the chorus of best-selling contemporary domestic thrillers, a triumphant #MeToo parable has emerged: that of the flawed, scorned, disbelieved, misjudged, and underestimated female witness whose testimony is rejected—but turns out to be correct. Vindication, cruelly belated, is nonetheless sweet. It is the voice of Detective Little, shaking his head and telling the woman in the window, “I owe you an apology.” ♦