I recently finished The Woman in the Window, a mystery/suspense novel with the fun gimmick that it’s pretty much constructed by mixing the plots and themes of several classic Hitchcock films. (Rear Window, obviously, but also Vertigo, Dial M for Murder, Psycho, and a few others—I’m not enough of a Hitchcock fan to have caught all the references). I enjoyed it: that is to say, I enjoyed reading it, and once it was all over, the retroactive experience was satisfying. (With suspense stories, much of the pleasure of reading comes from that suspended state of uncertainty as you are carried along by the plot, and if it doesn’t come to a good resolution, the resulting discomfort reflects backward and gives a bad taste to the earlier reading experience.) The plot of The Woman in the Window wasn’t perfect—there were some holes, the characters were two-dimensional at best, and the story had a few too many red herrings for my taste—; then again, Hitchock’s classic films also had plot holes and that didn’t stop them from working just fine (although I personally think Rear Window is way overrated; it seems like a great gimmick without a good-enough story to go with it). Just as a comparison, I much preferred The Woman in the Window to Gone Girl, and Gone Girl was pretty good.

The background to why I was reading this book is that, to improve my language skills I’m reading books in French. I’ve read a few legit French novels, but it’s a lot of work. A much more relaxing route is to read popular books that have been translated from English, in part because the sorts of books that get translated might be on the simpler side, in part because I suspect that translators streamline the prose, and in part because if a book is set in an English-speaking country I’ll be more familiar with the idioms (which I can often recognize as direct translations) and the cultural references. This was a story about some comfortable families in Manhattan—I can relate to that! In any case, one thing I enjoyed about the book was not just the plot, the story’s management of suspense, and its well-executed action sequences, but also its wit. The main character had a lot of clever reflections. One thing you’ll notice if you read classic suspense novels going back to the 1930s is that the authors will occasionally pause the action to share some philosophical reflections. This is part of what makes these stories work; it’s related to the integration of thought and action that we’ve earlier discussed in the context of D. J. Taylor and John Le Carré.

One reason I give this book credit is that it was a real page-turner. Even though I was reading it in a different language, hence a constant struggle, not knowing many of the words, often having to go back a page or two and reread to figure out exactly what was going on . . . even so, I didn’t want to put it down! As Joyce Carol Oates put it in her review of the book, “staccato paragraphs expand ‘The Woman in the Window’ to more than four hundred pages even as they allow those pages to be read and turned in a near-continuous forward motion.” That’s not so easy for a book to propel the reader like that. The last one that worked that way for me was “Tous les membres de ma famille ont déjà tué quelqu’un”—actually, that one was much better, but a book that great does not come along very often. (Also, while I have you on the line: could someone please translate the sequel to Widowland into French? I’ve been waiting for awhile here!)

I was curious about The Woman in the Window and its author—I knew from the bookstore display that he’s since published another book—so after finishing it I went straight to Wikipedia to learn more. And one thing I learned is that the author is a cool, calculating liar and may have plagiarized key aspects of the plot and characters of his book!

A few months ago we discussed Andrew Huberman, the Stanford professor and junk-science entrepreneur, who’s been accused of bad behavior in his personal life, a story that reminded me of George Orwell’s discussion of Salvador Dali, the influential artist who also (according to Orwell) was an all-around bad person.

In some sense the Huberman case was less interesting because we didn’t have to ask the question, “Can a bad person be a good scientist?”, because he doesn’t seem to be much of a scientist! So in that sense I don’t really care about his behavior outside of the office.

The A. J. Finn story is more interesting, first because he unambigously did bad things (lying about his background, faking disease, leaving cups of urine in his boss’s office), second because he’s talented: his book really is witty and moves well. I don’t quite understand the quote here where someone said Finn “abuse[d] his status at the expense of other employees,” but, yeah, I don’t like when people go around lying and possibly stealing.

A movie was made from the book but it did not get great reviews. I can believe it. To me, what made the book work was not the plot, which did the job just fine but was nothing special, but rather the pacing, the wit, and the Hitchcock bit, none of which would be easy to transfer to the screen.

How did the revelations of the author’s misconduct affect my view of the book?

I know what I’m supposed to say here, which is that the author is separate from the book. Learning that the author was at worst an asshole and at best a very troubled person should not affect my enjoyment of the book. And it didn’t.

But . . . there’s something.

Suspecting that Finn constructed his book by putting together materials he stole from others (yeah, he denies it, but given that he’s lied about so many other things, I have no reason at all to respect his denial), this gives me a new view of the imperfections of The Woman in the Window. Maybe one reason its pieces don’t perfectly fit together is that they were taken from different places? It also gives a different flavor to the Hitchcock-homage them, if large parts of the book were stolen.

I’m still planning to read Finn’s second book, but I’m anticipating it a lot less, seeing as now he’s gonna have to try to write something from scratch for the first time ever. I wonder if it will include a character who fakes an illness and then leaves cups of urine sitting around the office?

Fake literature is different from fake scence

I can anticipate possibly liking Finn’s next book, even if it’s plagiarized! I don’t have any interest in reading future books by the math professor who copies chess stories without attribution and without checking them, or whatever future papers the pizzagate guy, the shreddergate guy, or the gremlins guy manage to publish. They’ve already blown up their reputations, and they were writing nonfiction that had purported factual value, no entertainment value to speak of.