New diagnosis for author opens a window into noir
Man behind bestselling debut explains creating a thriller with ‘a bit more on its mind’
Make some room, Fire and Fury.
After Michael Wolff’s book cannonballed into the consciousness just days into the new year — a scorching Oval Office tell-all that turned into a bestseller overnight — it wasn’t lost on those of us who follow these things what book had also joined it on the New York Times bestseller list.
While Wolff’s book holds steady at No. 1 in the nonfiction lineup, The Woman in the Window, by A.J. Finn, jumped that same week to a similar place in the fiction column (in the U.S. as well as Canada), making it the most talked-about novel in this still-callow year.
Both books, as it so happens, revel in unreliable narrators and are freak shows by any stretch. But might it be the novel that has the legs?
Finn’s book — a tingly Sudoku puzzle — is, after all, making the kind of noise that comes along only rarely: not only is it the first debut novel in 12 years to shoot right to No. 1 on that aforementioned Times list; it also enjoys a steroid-shot from any number of Grade-A authors in whose genre it shares space (infectious blurbs from Gillian Flynn, Stephen King, Ruth Ware, etc., yell from its flap).
Unsurprisingly, the rights for its inevi- table movie adaptation have already been bought outright, courtesy of Scott Rudin (the power producer of The Social Network and No Country for Old Men, among many others), with a screenplay underway by Tracy Letts, he of the Tony-topping August: Osage County.
Oh and it doesn’t hurt, of course, that “A.J. Finn” in real life, is tall, dark and Gyllenhaal-ish on the handsome scale.
Tell me: is life fair? It begged an investigation.
Enter: Daniel Mallory. He’s the guy behind the gender-neutral name that flanks the cover of The Woman in the Window. I tracked him down the other day.
“Voyeurism is a primal instinct,” he was telling me soon enough, settling into a generous to-and-fro. “We are all voyeurs and what is a novelist if not the ultimate voyeur?”
In a nutshell, his book concerns Anna Fox, a child psychologist who has become a Merlot-guzzling hot mess, suffering from clinical agoraphobia and spending much of her time monitoring her park-side neighbours when she’s not bingewatching classic movies (Hitchcock, anyone?), and one day sees a sharp glint of a silver something and a bloodied hand on a window (or does she?).
When asked about the genesis for his screwy, well-sculpted story, Mallory has quite the story-behindthe-story.
“In 2001, when I was 21 years old, I was diagnosed with severe clinical depression. For 15 years after that, I went from medication to meditation, and cycled through every treatment possible.”
Then, some time later: “I saw a Russian psychiatrist . . . a brilliant Russian psychiatrist . . . who ba- sically told me I’d been misdiagnosed. Told me I was actually bipolar. I pushed back, saying how was this possible? I’d never had a manic episode, like Carrie does in Homeland! But he told me there are different levels of bipolar . . . and that he thought I had Bipolar 2.”
The upshot? A vastly different prescription. And an opportunity to take some time off from his job (in publishing) while he shifted from the old medication to new (“like Bruce Banner turning into the Hulk,” he further quips about the process).
One day, though, when sitting around watching Rear Window ( the Jimmy Stewart voyeur-classic), “a light flared in my peripheral vision and I saw that a neighbour had turned on a light . . . and that’s when the idea took root in my mind. A happy collision of character and story.”
No doubt leaping at the chance to leverage the female-driven genremania that’s been set forth by thrillers like Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, he said he “wanted to write a thriller that made use of the tropes that Rear Window established, but at the same time I wanted to create a book that had a bit more on its mind and in its heart than your average psychological thriller.”
When the name Patricia Highsmith floats from his mouth soon after this, I zero in. Knowing that Mallory wrote his doctoral thesis on Highsmith while a graduate student at Oxford, I ask about his main takeaways regarding the gruesome queen of suspense, from whose mind came The Talented Mr. Ripley, for starters.
“So, I grew up reading Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie,” he starts to say, “but Highsmith was really a pioneer of psychological suspense. What thrilled me about Highsmith — but also disturbed me — was that she got you rooting for an antagonist. Crime fiction typically reinforces social norms; by the end of the book, the wicked are punished. Order is restored. Ripley, on the other hand (Highsmith’s most anti-hero) gets away with murder.”
Is his book noir or is it a thriller? It’s a question that swam into my head, more than once, when making my way through it.
“I think it hews closer to noir,” Mallory confirms, agreeing with my own assertion that there’s a certain knowingness about noir that probably distinguishes itself from other genres.
A playfulness, that is to say, that beckons readers to conspire with the author and even luxuriate in the trappings of the genre. (Example: the lesser-known Hitchcock film Rope, which I love, and is one of the many, many movies called out in The Woman in the Window.)
When asked if his book is a “feminist book,” he answers with a hellyeah: “It’s one of the things I’m proud of. So often in thrillers, female characters predicate their welfare on men or depend on men. Anna Fox drags herself out of her predicament.”
When the subject of putting the seemingly obligatory “girl” in the title comes up, he is also similarly emphatic (“I didn’t want a girl title. Unequivocally”). When I wonder about the way technology is used to move along the plot, especially for a main character who is a total shut-in, he is only too happy to opine: “It’s sort of been an ongoing frustration of mine, the way technology scuttles suspense plotting. But in my book, it only helps to reinforce the notion of misrepresentation and the trope of mistaken identity.”
This dude’s interests clearly run the gamut. At one point, he says he’s reading a book about eels (“they’re fascinating”). At another, he mentions he loves to sail (the family home in East Hampton lit his passion). OK, so why the nom de plume? It’s the mystery behind the mystery and I can’t help but wonder if it’s an attempt, perhaps, to appeal to readers of Gillian Flynn, Tana French and Paula Hawkins, who might be partial to a female author of a female-driven thriller?
Mallory will only say the pseudonym initially came about because of his work on the other side of publishing at William Morrow (until the end of 2017). “I didn’t want my finger on the scale,” is how he puts it. Moreover, the idea of an invented name appealed because “I’m a very private person.”
It’s ironic, isn’t it, I laugh, “that for someone who wrote a book about agoraphobia, you’re now heading into a book tour, which is as extroverted an experience you can have.” He chuckles back. “I’m stealing that!” he tells me.