The woman in the window A novel

A damsel in distress can be a poor narrator. How to convey the magnitude of her troubles without letting her descend into irritating selfpity? Finn tackles this contradiction brilliantly, especially given his agoraphobic heroine's situation. Anna Fox is confiding and breezy, but not brittle. The conversations presented here as amusing really do amuse. Yet the fear is always there. Anna, a gentrifier in Harlem, spends a lot of time watching old movies and looking out her window. Separated by her illness from her husband and daughter, she's alone nearly all the time. But since she's a trained psychologist, she has eased into helping fellow sufferers online. Perky with her clients, she's less so in her asides to the reader, especially when she's rattling off the names of all the pills she adds to her incessant wine drinking. Eventually, Anna trains her professionally keen attention on some of her neighbors, members of a family that has moved into a townhouse across the way. As, one by one, they start to visit her, disturbingly different versions of their lives are on offer. Sometimes "The Woman in the Window" seems like a freshly warped version of an old mystery play, with its repeated entrances and exits on a single stage. Late at night, awash in pills and alcohol, Anna is sure she has seen a stabbing. Finn signals a key development ahead of time, but that doesn't soften the punch when it comes. Plenty of revelations ensue, and as they pile up the reader feels them right along with Anna.