Can a novel just be a novel without a screen adaptation to follow?
I first read A.J. Finn’s debut novel The Woman in the Window in 2019. Drawn in by the comparisons to Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins, as well as Stephen King’s cover blurb that described it as “unputdownable,” I was immediately hooked. It appeared to have everything I like in a novel: mystery, intrigue, crime, and a messy main character steadily teetering off the rails, but as I read it something struck me as odd.
To start with, I felt that I’d read it before. Not that exact story, but parts of it. Sure, there were the obvious parallels to Hitchcock’s Rear Window, but this was clearly referenced: hell, the main character in the novel herself is a Hitchcock fan, so that all seemed perfectly intentional. The Woman in the Window also has strangely notable similarities to the 1995 film Copycat starring Jamie Lee Curtis, which I had seen years prior. But no, that wasn’t quite it either. There was something else just… off. It was a fun read, but it just didn’t feel right. The Woman in the Window is solid, if a little predictable. It is not, in my opinion, a bad, or poorly crafted, or boring story, and I have no doubt it will make an entertaining watch on Netflix in a few day’s time. But if you read the book and your gut instinct tells you that it feels somewhat contrived, then, well, you might just be onto something.
It wasn’t until I read Ian Parker’s excellent article in The New Yorker about the, ah, intriguing author of The Woman in the Window, whose real name is Dan Mallory, that I was slapped in the face with what I’d found so unsettling: the book was not written just to be a book. The book was quite likely written with the intention of being adapted to the big screen.
As Ian Parker notes in his article, the novel “reads like a film script that has been novelized, on a deadline.” Parker also points out that the main character’s name, Anna Fox, was partially selected because it was easy to pronounce in many languages, and that author Dan Mallory has even said that part of the reason he chose the pseudonym A.J. Finn is because it reads well on a small screen.
The novel titles’ similarity to those like Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train seems a subtle nod to the recent-ish popularity of thriller novels featuring a potential murder, trainwreck female main characters, intertwined relationships, and the scandalous, seedy underbelly of ordinary people’s lives. The similar titles capitalize on the branding of this popular niche; it’s like a code that the consumer recognizes so they know what they’re being sold here, an intentional choice made for market success and adaptability. And it’s not wrong of Mallory to do this; in fact, these are smart and deliberate moves, moves that paid. The Woman in the Window elicited competitive bids at sale, and the film rights were purchased by Fox. It’s certainly not a bad move to keep market trends in mind when writing a novel, and having a debut manuscript reach such levels of success, even for an experienced editor like Mallory, is nothing to be scoffed at. There’s nothing wrong with being tactical in your craft, or dreaming that the novel you’re banging out on your dinky little laptop could one day be loved so much that fans pine for it to be recreated on the silver screen.
There is, however, something I don’t like about the self-awareness of writing a novel with the sole intention of it being adapted for the screen, as if it cheapens the act of writing a novel itself. Literature is not a stepping stone to something better, and, while we all have our preferences, a book is not a somehow inferior form of media, but treating it this way makes it seem like a necessary gateway to the cooler, brighter, more exciting world of Netflix and Gen-Z actors in title roles.
I recall a class I took at University, where a sociology professor discussed the idea that at one point in time, life and human interaction existed when television did not. The professor then went on to point out that, in our lives, most people were born into a world where televised fiction of everyday life had long existed and that we now grow up watching the human interactions modeled on television, knowing no different, and it was now impossible to tell if our behaviour as humans was in part based on what we observed on television. Was modern life was imitating art, was art was imitating modern life, or we were just imitating each other in a strange feedback loop of scrambled human behaviour?
Or, in the words of Ani DiFranco, “Art may imitate life, but life imitates TV.”
Is it the same with modern literature, where novels no longer exist without the influence of film and television? Are many modern novels simply trying to replicate what we see on-screen, while what we see on-screen tries to capture fictional literary worlds that never quite translate? Can a story simply exist any more, without the expectation that it will be written to translate efficiently to another medium?
With the books I read as a child or a teen, part of the magic of them being adapted for the screen is the how. As a child I wondered how, how, how could a fantastical story like Harry Potter, so well told in the written form, possibly be captured in a movie? I remember when The Lovely Bones was made into a film and it seemed such a lost cause to me, because the beauty and surreal imagery of the book could never be recreated outside of Alice Sebold’s writing, but Peter Jackson came along you guys, and, well, I’m not the biggest fan of the film, but the man gave it a red-hot go, and I’ll admit: it was exciting to see his take on the story.
Sometimes stories, or parts of them, simply don’t translate from text to screen but that’s to be expected as these stories are not written for the big screen. They got there in an attempt to recreate a beloved work of fiction. What makes adaptable works like the Harry Potter series worth adapting is, ironically, their strength, their ingenuity, their ability to stand alone as a book. But now, it seems, books have adapted to the idea of being, well, adapted, and the question of screen adaptation isn’t so much in the how, but the when or who. It’s seemingly a given that any novel with a modicum of success will become a miniseries or a film. Recently I read Liane Moriarty’s Truly Madly Guilty, and as I read it, I couldn’t help but wonder: in the inevitable mini-series adaptation, which character will Reese Witherspoon play?
I read Christian White’s debut thriller novel, The Nowhere Child last year, and I had the same weird feeling that I had when I read The Woman in the Window. Again, don’t get me wrong; I really enjoyed the novel, but as I read it, it seemed so perfectly crafted for the screen that it was almost forced.
There’s the obvious reasons I felt this way: the title that followed the trend of other recent thrillers, and the mystery of a missing child, which would easily translate into a marketable premise for a film. There was the simple descriptive language used, which reminded me of Mallory’s writing, and the on-trend flawed-but-likable female narrator. There were tactical choices which I’d assume made the book more marketable to a wider consumer base, such as the events of the book being set in America, despite the main character (and author) being from Australia. There was imagery in the story that would apply beautifully to film if the right stylistic choices were made (the contrast between the Australian and American settings, the flashbacks of Sammy Went and the rest of the intertwined cast in the 90s, the snakes and religious imagery.)
I was curious, and I googled the author Christian White, only to find out his profession is screenwriting.
The problem with The Woman in the Window is that it attempts to capitalize on a trend without realizing why the trend exists. Gone Girl was not popular because it was a book that read like a movie, but because it was fresh and compelling, and it breathed new life into the psychological thriller genre through excellent character building and storytelling. As an audience, we’re hungry for new stories, but instead we receive a response of, oh, you like this new cool thing? You enjoyed Gone Girl? Well, here’s ten more versions of that, each bearing slightly less quality than the last, and don't worry; here’s roughly a thousand Marvel movies to tide you over, just in case you get bored while you wait for the next new, exciting thing to emerge and be ruined.
I’m begging the powers that be: just let a novel be a novel, and a screenplay be a screenplay, and if a story is truly that compelling, don’t worry: I’m sure HBO or Reese will be on it like that.
