Watching You: A Novel

“For a minute she thinks it’s a bloodstained twist of tissue, maybe, or an old bandage. Then she thinks perhaps it is a dead flower. But as she looks at it more closely she can see that it’s a tassel. A red suede tassel. The sort that might once have been attached to a handbag, or to a boot.”

Much of Watching You revolves around the difficulty of knowing and understanding other people and situations. The text starts with Detective Pelham’s confusion over the identity and origin of a key piece of evidence, setting up the ontological challenges faced by characters throughout the novel, perceived in the theme of Social Appearances and Deceptive Façades.

“It’s an innocuous room, bland even. A kitchen like a million other kitchens all across the country. A kitchen for drinking coffee in, for doing homework and eating breakfast and reading newspapers in. Not a kitchen for dark secrets or crimes of passion. Not a kitchen for murdering someone in.”

The author emphasizes the crime scene’s ordinary and unremarkable nature, highlighting its function as a space for everyday activities and emphasizing the contrast between the mundane space and the “dark secrets” and “crimes of passion” of the text’s central mystery. This juxtaposition heightens the initial tension and establishes a world in which appearances frequently differ from realities. The novel’s domestic setting is also reminiscent of the suburban environment of many novels within the thriller genre.

“The houses of Melville Heights popped like a row of children’s building blocks: red, yellow, turquoise, purple, lime, sage, fuchsia, red again. They sat atop a terraced embankment looking down on the small streets of Lower Melville like guests at a private party that no one else was invited to. Iconic was the word that people used to describe this row of twenty-seven Victorian villas: the iconic painted houses of Melville Heights. Joey had seen them from a distance for most of her life. They were the sign that she was less than twenty minutes from home on long car journeys of her childhood. They followed her to work; they guided her home again.”

The passage depicts the houses of Melville Heights, heavily relying on figurative language to establish their effect on the residents of the neighborhood. The contrast between the physically elevated and colorful houses and the small streets of Lower Melville creates a tension between exclusivity and inclusivity.