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: 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. 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.
“ The Woman in the Window” (Morrow), a highly successful début novel by the pseudonymous A. J. 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.
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. Illustration by Jeffrey SmithĪn archetype, as Mark Twain might have observed, is nothing but a stereotype with a college education. In many recent domestic thrillers, the credibility of the female witness is at stake.
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