Most of Jon Roemer’s Five Windows happens in a San Francisco apartment that’s been stripped of its ceiling and walls. In this space that feels like a black box theatre, the book’s unnamed narrator interacts with a handful of characters, mostly from a distance. From these sparse elements, Roemer constructs a thoroughly fascinating and sometimes hilarious narrative that touches on global injustice, gentrification, and the alienation of modern life. It’s reminiscent of those tide pools whose miniature, self-contained ecosystems are microcosms of the ocean at large.
The protagonist of Five Windows operates a small indie press with two other people who report in from St. Louis and New York. When not reading his slush pile, he looks out his windows at a neighborhood where a wave of gentrification is in full swing, and, to some neighbors’ disdain, a large area is being demolished to make room for a new transit hub. Meanwhile, a growing encampment of people who are unhoused encroaches on affluent townhomes; the volatility is underscored by frequent, mysterious explosions and fires. It’s all emergency responders can do to prevent the flames from consuming the entire block.
Much of the narrator’s headspace is occupied by an ended marriage whose demise he hasn’t sorted out, and he finds distraction in the lives of people in his community, which he pieces together from what he sees through his windows.
The situation is thrown off-balance by two events: first, the seemingly perfect relationship of his upstairs neighbors begins to crumble in dramatic fashion, and, second, the narrator is unexpectedly contacted by a wildly famous author offering a manuscript for his press to publish; however, the manuscript is problematic, the offer comes with strings attached, and the author’s public behavior has become increasingly strange.
The novel’s title, combined with narrator’s voyeurism, and his tendency to construct questionable and sometimes lurid narratives about the lives of his neighbors, evokes comparisons to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and these comparisons becomes even more inevitable when the narrator injures his leg and finds himself confined to his apartment. The comparisons go beyond plot elements, too; like Rear Window, Five Windows shows us the irony a life where people live very close to one another, yet exist in isolation.
Five Windows might remind us of other works about isolated observers, as well. The narrator of this novel isn’t terribly unlike Nick Carraway, observing Gatsby’s glamourous world from afar. And there’s hints of things like Robinson Crusoe here, too; the narrator of Five Windows is like a shipwrecked survivor on a deserted island. And, as I read this novel, I found myself surprised to be thinking about Walden Pond, about Thoreau’s watching and thinking, about his “masses of men living in quiet desperation.”
There’s a metaphor in Five Windows, though, that distinguishes it from those other works—the narrator’s compulsive habit of viewing the world through his apartment windows strongly evokes the pervasive, alienating experience of knowing the world mainly through the screen of a computer or phone.
But the alienation caused by the internet isn’t just a metaphor in this book. When the narrator isn’t looking out his windows, he tends to be online, working with submitted manuscripts, holding video conferences with his colleagues, or browsing the web, where he views tragedies and observes his friends and neighbors on social media, watching their online lives just as if they were standing on the sidewalk below his home.
As a result, the narrator lives in a near-constant state of confusion, anxiety, vigilance, and seclusion. He knows almost nothing about his colleagues, even after working with them for many years, and what he does know, he learns mainly from internet searches. When a neighbor who lives nearby arrives to fix a broken window, the narrator doesn’t recognize him. He mainly knows his ex-wife through her LinkedIn profile. He knows the famous author who wants to work with him via malfunctioning video calls and scattered clips of online videos. The narrator is cut off from the world, in part because he is physically isolated, and in part because all of his relationships to other people are distant, incomplete, mediated, and glitchy.
This problem lacks a simple solution. The internet has become so deeply woven into our lives that going off the grid doesn’t immediately provide a healthy relationship to their self and others; in fact, it probably just makes it very difficult to exist. In the same sense, if the narrator were simply to brick up his windows, he’d only find himself more isolated (not to mention that the problems outside those windows would, of course, continue to persist).
While a quest for a wholly unmediated, “natural” life would likely feel naïve in the world of this book, there is some hope. At the end of this novel, the narrator finds some means of progress by deciding to pay as much attention to his interior (both literal and figurative) as he does to the outside. At a time when we’re barraged by information—much of it troubling—from all directions at all possible moments—when our digital and physical lives and identities have become inseparably tangled—Five Windows suggests that shifting one’s focus inward might be a first step towards developing healthier, more meaningful relationships to the world and the people in it.
Five Windows, by Jon Roemer. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Dzanc Books, September 2019. 184 pages. $16.95, paper.
Carl Fuerst is the author of The Falling Crystal Palace (Planet Bizarro, 2023) and The Upright Dog (Alien Buddha, 2022). He is a co-creator of the Deadfall, Wisconsin podcast. He teaches writing and literature at Kishwaukee College, and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
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