The Man in the Window
Read The Man in the Window Online
Authors: Jon Cohen,Nancy Pearl
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Humor, #Literary, #United States, #Contemporary Fiction, #Humor & Satire, #American, #General Humor, #Literary Fiction, #Romance
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 1992 Jon Cohen
Introduction and Readers’ Guide copyright © 2013 Nancy Pearl
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by AmazonEncore
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781477848937
ISBN-10: 1477848932
CONTENTS
PART ONE THE MONSTER OF WAVERLY
PART TWO THE MAN IN THE WINDOW
PART THREE WIDOWS AND WIDOWERS
PART FOUR THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
Reader’s Guide for
The Man in the Window
Suggestions for Further Reading
Introduction
P
ROBABLY THE
question that I’m most often asked by people is, “How do you choose what you’re going to read?” and I don’t really have a good answer for them. I can relate to the novelist Carrie Brown (my favorite book of hers is
Lamb in Love
) who described herself as being “a promiscuous reader.” I’ll give almost any book a chance to have its way with me. I read all sorts of nonfiction (pretty much everything, in fact, but generally not self-help books, unless they’re by Harriet Lerner—my favorite of hers is
The Dance of Anger
). History and current events have always been two of my particular nonfiction favorites. And of course I read a lot of fiction, both literary and genre (which is not to say that I think a sharp line can be drawn between the two).
I usually start off the process of identifying my next book by cruising the shelves in a bookstore or library, looking for jacket art that seduces my eye or a title that tugs at my mind. I know from long experience that if the author’s name on the cover is in a bigger font size than the title, then I can be pretty sure the book is aimed directly at the best-seller list and therefore probably isn’t one that I want to take to bed (where I do a lot of my reading) with me.
Then I open the book to a random page in order to get a sense of whether it’s worth my while trying to develop a relationship with it or whether I’m better off putting it back on the shelf where I found it, knowing that it’s not right for me. (Kind of like a first date.) For example, if I discover that I’m going to be inside the head of a vicious serial killer—or sociopaths in general—even if it’s only in the first chapter or in alternate chapters, then it’s a no-go. I remember once asking
a little boy—he must have been about 7 or 8—what kind of books he liked. “No dead dogs,” he told me. I knew exactly what he meant. For me, it’s no murdered, or tortured, or sexually abused children.
I study the blurbs on the back of the book, not so much to see what they say about the book (they’re all, obviously, going to wax eloquent about how wonderful it is; otherwise they wouldn’t be there) but rather who’s saying it. If the blurbists are writers or reviewers whom I respect, I’m more inclined to read the book. I also check to see if the quotes are taken from reviews in newspapers or magazines, or if they were solicited from the author’s friends or the editor’s contacts in the literary world. There was a column called “Logrolling in Our Time” in the (very) late, (very) lamented
Spy
magazine that revealed authors each of whom wrote a glowing blurb for the other’s book. If the blurbists all live within hailing distance of each other, I don’t take it as a good sign. Believe me, read enough and you get to know these things, like where the authors live. Writers are asked to blurb books all the time—I receive at least one request a week. (Margaret Atwood has a wonderful poem called “Letter sent in reply to requests for blurbs” that speaks to this; it’s easy to find on the Internet.)
I found Jon Cohen’s
The Man in the Window
when I was working as the head of collection development at the Tulsa (OK) City-County Library System in the spring of 1992, right after it had been published. It was displayed face out on the “New Books” shelf. I didn’t love the cover, which was in various shades of green and brown and centered on a Picasso-esque painting of a man’s head and upper body apparently looking out through (or maybe embedded in, it was hard to tell) a window. There was nothing especially wrong with it (I am a great fan of cubism), but there wasn’t anything that I found especially appealing, either. I turned the book over and looked at the blurbs on the back of the jacket. One, from an author I wasn’t familiar with, was for the book I was holding. The other four, taken from newspaper
reviews, referred to Cohen’s first novel,
Max Lakeman and the Beautiful Stranger
, which I hadn’t read.
No obvious turn-offs, so far, but neither was I hearing that little voice (the one that I never tire of; that delights me, still) telling me that this might be a book I didn’t want to miss. So what made me open
The Man in the Window
to the first page and start reading? It was, perhaps illogically, actually the size and shape of the book itself. Not its thickness, nor the number of its pages, but rather its length and breadth. It was a hardcover, but was the size and shape of a trade paperback, which were not as ubiquitous in the early 1990s as they are now. It looked like it would be utterly comfortable to hold. It looked like a book that could easily be lost amongst the bigger and brawnier novels on the shelf, the runt of the litter, so to speak, and I just couldn’t resist giving it a chance to win me over.
And when I read the entrancing first line of
The Man in the Window
, I knew I’d made no mistake. Here was a novel to love. And so it proved to be. That first line—“Atlas Malone saw the angel again, this time down by the horse chestnut tree.”—made it impossible for me to put the book down. I loved the interplay of the fantastic—an angel!—with the utterly prosaic—a horse chestnut tree. And the specificity: not just any old chestnut tree, but a
horse
chestnut. (I have to say here that, not being a gardener or arborist, I never knew there were such things as horse chestnut trees before I read
The Man in the Window
. You read and learn.) And that simple word “again.” How could I bear not to find out when Atlas encountered an angel before? Clearly, this was a book that was written with a reader like me in mind.
For many years, whenever I was asked to give a talk about good books to read, I would include
The Man in the Window
, and I’d describe it to the audience this way:
When he was sixteen, Louis Malone was caught in a fire that erupted at his father’s hardware store. He was burned so badly that for the next sixteen years he didn’t go
out of his family’s house, spending his days watching the outside world through his second story bedroom window. And even in the house he covered up the terrible scars on his face by wearing a scarf around his mouth and chin and a baseball cap with a Pittsburgh Pirates logo pulled down low over his forehead. But one day Louis reenters that world, falling from, or somehow being impelled through, the window that he’s been hiding behind for so many years. Rushed to the hospital by neighbors who are wild with curiosity to find out what he looks like underneath his hat and scarf (which he manages to keep on despite the fall and a broken arm), he meets Iris Shula, an Intensive Care nurse who’s covering the emergency room when he arrives. Iris describes herself as being four foot seven and weighing one hundred fifty-five “very poorly distributed pounds,” with “a nose like a boxer’s, and the complexion of a corpse.”
Then I’d read from the book: “Iris had been an unappealing baby—and babyhood, as it turned out, was her physical high point. She went from unappealing to unattractive, and by the time she moved into adolescence, she’d become undeniably homely. Even her parents, who loved her, who gave her every benefit of the doubt and then some, could not dispute the evidence.”
And I’d conclude by saying that Iris, in her own way, had been just as alone in the outside world as Louis had been in his upstairs room. And that the relationship that slowly develops between Louis and Iris both breaks and remakes the reader’s heart and offers some good laughs along the way.
Usually when I’m perusing book jacket copy, I take words like life-affirming, heartwarming, touching, uplifting, poignant, and tender as a warning: DO NOT READ, LIKELY TO BE SENTIMENTAL CLAPTRAP. But in the hands of that all too rare writer who respects his readers and doesn’t try to manipulate
them through cheap emotions and easy tears, a book can be deeply satisfying
because
it is so authentically life-affirming and heart-warming, etc. Cohen is such a writer, and
The Man in the Window
is such a novel.
Nancy Pearl
T
O
M
OLLY AND
B
EN
PART ONE
THE MONSTER OF WAVERLY
CHAPTER ONE
A
TLAS MALONE
saw the angel again, this time down by the horse chestnut tree. Yesterday the angel had stood, in a floaty sort of way, beside the raspberry patch—Atlas couldn’t tell if its feet touched the ground with any kind of earthly weight. Indeed, when he inspected the spot later, not a blade of grass had been disturbed, although an entire cane of raspberries had been picked. Gracie, his wife, said she had not gone near his patch.