Book Review: The Woman in the Window by AJ Finn
According to TS Eliot, good writers borrow and great writers steal. Here is the book that proves it isn’t true. The Woman in the Window has literally cherry-picked plot points from so many well-known books and movies that it’s hard to find a single moment of originality within its pages. While it certainly makes for a readable (and very familiar) book, it’s hardly the formula for a remarkable novel.
Anna Fox has been an agoraphobic shut-in for ten months. She’s separated from her husband and daughter (although she speaks to them daily) and her only connections to the outside world are her basement tenant, David, who does the odd jobs that being a shut-in prevents her from doing; Bina, the physical therapist who is helping her recover from the physical injuries that led to her becoming a shut-in; and Julian, the psychiatrist who is helping her recover from the psychological injuries that led to her becoming a shut-in.
To pass the time, Anna uses her experience as a former child psychologist to counsel others with agoraphobia on a website forum called the Agora, plays online chess, watches classic suspense movies and spies on her neighbours as they go about their lives. And, of course, there’s the alcohol. Copious amounts of it.
When the Russells move in across the park, they are a painful reminder of the perfect family unit Anna has lost. Their teenage son Ethan brings a gift from his mother, then his mother Jane saves her from a panic attack when she steps outside to chase away Halloween trick-or-treaters egging the front of Anna’s house. They end up spending hours chatting, drinking, smoking and playing chess. Jane even sketches a picture of Anna.
About 150 pages later (it seems to take a long time to get to the main plot point) and after Anna spends a lot of time sitting at the many windows of her huge house and creepily looking into the houses of all her neighbours (don’t these people know how to close the blinds?), she sees Jane arguing angrily with someone in her lounge room. Anna can’t see who else is in the room. Jane disappears behind a wall and when she emerges back in front of the window, a silver handle is sticking out of her chest and blood stains the front of her shirt.
Anna immediately calls 911 and tries to leave the house to render assistance but has a massive panic attack in the park and passes out. The emergency services dispatched think she is the emergency and take her to hospital where they have to sedate her to get her to calm down. When she wakes up the next day, she’s told she imagined the whole episode and that Jane Russell is fine. Except when she goes home and Jane Russell arrives to prove she’s fine, she isn’t the same woman Anna spent all those hours with. Is she really going crazy or is someone trying to cover up a murder?
Sound like something you’ve read or seen before? A bit Rear Window-ish? A bit Copycat-ish? A bit Girl on the Train? The whole story is a mish-mash of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, We Were Liars, Vertigo and about 100 other classic Hitchcockian movies. AJ Finn isn’t shy about letting the reader know how much he’s stealing from other writers – the main character sits down and watches those black-and-white movies every night and uses them to help her figure out what is going on.
The main problem is that if Anna has seen it before in a movie, then the likelihood is that the reader has as well. So nothing seems new or different. The writing is done well and I read the whole book in two days but the plot and the characters are just not worthy of a novel with as much hype as this one has.
The truth is that AJ Finn is actually much more intriguing than anything he has written. The name is the pseudonym of Dan Mallory, a former book editor who weaved a fake personal history involving having cancer, completing a doctorate at Oxford, the death of his mother, the suicide of his brother and his discovery of JK Rowling as a crime writer (none of which are true apparently). If someone wrote a biography about him, I’d probably find that much more interesting than this derivative book.
The Woman in the Window is just barely tolerable. If I were going to recommend anything to do with AJ Finn, it would be the articles exposing him because they are about a real mystery. And if he could come up with all of that backstory for himself, he should have been able to come up with something nearly as good for his debut novel. But he didn’t.
2.5 stars
*First published on Goodreads 20 April 2021
