Alfred Hitchcock may have said all there is to say about the fallibility
of making assumptions about what you see through a window, but, like
most important lessons, this one can bear some repeating. To the limited
scope of a window frame, the former London journalist Paula Hawkins, in
her debut thriller, “The Girl on the Train,” offers a few additional
obfuscations. First, her novel’s protagonist, Rachel, looks out through
the window of a moving train on her daily commute. Second, Rachel is
your basic hot mess: depressed, unemployed, still in mourning for the
death of her marriage and prone to alcoholic blackouts that coincide
with critical moments in the tale of a missing woman later found dead.
Rachel might as well be wearing a sign that reads “Unreliable Narrator.”
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