The picture perfect age of social media has resulted in a literary backlash of sorts. There is a plethora of books centered on pulling back the curtain on all the curation to reveal the dark side of domestic perfection. I’m not sure that any character is as widely used these days as the casual stalker. Characters Facebook stalk each other with surprising ease. Catfishing is just another tool of amateur sleuthing.
There is some social commentary going on here: what exactly is the line between refreshing an Instagram feed and peering over your neighbors’ hedges? And what is this curiosity really all about? The tyranny of expectations? The inevitability that appearances are deceiving?
There is a theory that a narcissist conceals the truth about herself by projecting the opposite image. Maybe the moral here is about the narcissism pandemic.
Whatever the reason, spying on your neighbors makes for good suspense. Here are a few books about window gazing and how they stack up.
1.
I’m sure somebody somewhere has described Lisa Jewell as the British Liane Moriarty. Both authors deal chiefly with the secrets that lurk beneath domestic gloss. This book is set in a Bristol neighborhood. The characters live in brightly colored houses (I had serious housing envy about the location) that belie a personal tension. Joey, the protagonist, is infatuated with her married neighbor, a school superintendent. Another neighbor is convinced that she saw the superintendent yelling at a woman not his wife. And, in intermittent sections, we see transcripts of police interviews. There has been a murder and they are closing in on a suspect. There is also a literal peeping Tom: a teenage boy with an attic bedroom and pair of high powered binoculars.
This was one of those books that I liked up until the final reveal. There is one secret that should have been placed later in the narrative: it gave away the possible motivation early on so the killer was only partly surprising. There was a secondary twist about the peeping Tom that I liked better.
2.
The protagonist is a depressed, childless woman living in Brooklyn who becomes obsessed with a gorgeous actress who lives in a brownstone near her. It is more about a descent into mental illness than a mystery. What I liked about it were the witty social observations. Forced into a dinner date with someone she doesn’t like, the protagonist says, “I agreed to meet with her because I didn’t have the energy to tell her that I never wanted to see her again.”
3.
This was my latest read in this subgenre. Set in a Brooklyn where green juice is as popular as coffee, the community is rocked by a murder of one of their own. And, to make matters worse, the killing stands to expose a dirty secret they all share. The protagonist, Lizzie, is pulled into this when a college crush, Zach, hires her to defend him.
The pacing was just right: the pages kept turning without scrimping on exposition. The characterization was spotty; I had trouble keeping all the lithe moms apart. I didn’t much care about Lizzie’s domestic dilemma. All in all, though, it delivered on the core promise of these books: it made a boring afternoon disappear.
Books Smitten 