The bitter end of the story
Since the publication of his blockbuster novel The Woman in the Window in 2018, A.J. Finn has become something of a serial blurber, adorning dozens of novels with his praise. Meanwhile, Finn's next novel — the second part of the two-book, $2 million deal he made with William Morrow in 2016 — remained a work in progress.
Expected to be published in 2020, the book, End of Story, finally lands.
The Woman in the Window was a smash hit that put its witty, camera-ready author on the cusp of celebrityhood. The book — a domestic suspense tale about an agoraphobic child psychologist who believes she has witnessed a murder sold millions of copies worldwide. But something funny happened on the way to fame.
In early 2019, an exposé in The New Yorker portrayed Finn, whose real name is Dan Mallory, as the kind of unreliable narrator you might find in an A.J. Finn novel. The article detailed a trail of lessthan-true stories Mallory had told about himself over the years: that he had a doctorate from Oxford; that his mother had died of cancer; that he had a brain tumour; that his brother had died by suicide. Colleagues reported that during his decade as a book editor, Mallory used these struggles to elicit sympathy, further his career and vanish when things got awkward. At one point, when Mallory was working in New York at Morrow, he stopped coming into the office, a disappearance that was explained away by a series of emails from a mysterious sender claiming to be Mallory's now-alive brother but sounding a lot like Mallory himself.
Mallory eventually confessed to his fibs, sort of. Through a publicist's statement to The New Yorker, he said that he had “severe bipolar II disorder,” which caused “delusional thoughts” and “memory problems.” Reaction to this expression of regret-cum-justification was mixed; some, including a letter-writer to The New Yorker with bipolar disorder, criticized the author for further stigmatizing the disease: “It was upsetting. ... Mental illness does not make you a liar, a scammer, or a cheat.”
Given this heavy baggage, to consider End of Story on its own merits poses a challenge. Let's try.
End of Story is written in the same staccato style as his debut novel. The first page ends: “A breath. Then that scream. They've found her.”
But things get leaden right away. The setup is complicated — as one character says, “There's too much time to keep track of.”
Nicky Hunter, the book's protagonist, is a young journalist hired by a dying mystery writer named Sebastian Trapp to write his biography. Trapp invites Nicky to live at his mansion in San Francisco while she writes. Trapp, called “the champion deceiver” (wink, wink), by critics, writes novels featuring a “gentleman English sleuth” named Simon St. John. Trapp is also a murder suspect. Years before, his first wife Hope and his son Cole disappeared and are presumed dead. How Trapp figures into this puzzle is one of the questions Nicky hopes to resolve while researching her book.
Sleeping in the bedroom once occupied by young Cole, Nicky gets to know various members of the Trapp family: Sebastian's bitter daughter Madeleine (“her hair is careless and blond, her shoulders round”), his beautiful second wife (“40-something, lavish lashes and Cupid's-bow lips”), his handsome, troubled nephew (“six feet of built-to-last, muscles bulging within his sleeves”). All of them think and speak in a similar way — droll, coy, urbane — which is to say with the same studied cleverness that Mallory deploys in interviews. Even Sebastian's dog, Watson, is a French bulldog, the breed favoured by Mallory. And then there's this comment by a bit character late in the book: “Moral indignation is envy with a halo.” Could that be Finn throwing shade on his critics?
The plot drags on — the phrase “the plot thickens” appears without obvious irony. At times the book reads like a dime-store romance novel: “Up and across. The man is vast, an eclipse in coat and tie, pink linen shirt taut around his belly, like the skin of some unwholesome fruit. Black eyes lurking beneath zigzag brows. Face the colour of rare beef.” (Thank you, but I think I'll have the chicken.) Elsewhere, you can almost see Finn consulting a thesaurus. “You absquatulated,” Nicky says to Madeleine, whose desk is “a dainty escritoire that chafes her thighs.” At one point, books are “rutilant in the light.” And the ending, which I shall not spoil, raises more questions than it answers.
Finn drops heavy references to the works of literary greats: Agatha Christie and Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo in particular. The epigraph is from Bleak House. A copy of Rebecca is the key to opening the door to a hidden room. The book includes a note on sources, citing Raymond Chandler and Dorothy Sayers, among others. Perhaps the purpose is to protect himself from another accusation of plagiarism, though it also comes off as rather self-aggrandizing: Does he think his words would be confused with those of Arthur Conan Doyle?
Let me end the suspense here: Even readers looking past Finn's personal woes — or those looking at them and wishing him well anyway — will quickly be hoping for end of story.