There is a scene near the beginning of Window with Father that I wrote four times before finally letting it stand
Harold Berman, a novelist nearing his seventieth birthday, places one of his own books on a kitchen scale. He waits until the display stabilizes. Then he takes the book off again—as if the result had indicated an error. He puts it back on. The scale shows the same number.
I didn’t want to explain what he was doing there. To this day, I have no desire to explain it fully. Yet I know why I kept the scene: It is the most honest image I could find for what this novel is about. Not weight as a metaphor. But weight as the only metric that doesn’t lie to you.
"Window with Father" is my third novel—and the one that emerged from the longest silence. My two previous books—The Delilah Principle and Without Any Proof—revolved around the theme of pressure: What happens within a relationship when one partner begins to seize interpretive control over their shared history; when intimacy shifts into a kind of administration? They were New York novels—in the sense that New York makes certain things visible: the small processes of negotiation, the polished surfaces, the plausible lies.
This novel is quieter. Or perhaps it moves in a different way.
Harold is a writer looking back on a career that one might describe as "respectable." But certainly not celebrated. The last review in the Times called his work "craftsmanlike yet subdued in its impact"—a sentence that offers congratulations, yet makes no further promises. He lives alone on the Upper West Side. His daughter lives in Boston; he hasn’t had a genuine conversation with her in years. As far as he can judge, he has done nothing that could be deemed a catastrophic mistake.
It is at precisely this point that the novel begins.
I was interested in a very specific kind of damage—the kind that does not manifest in a single scene, a confrontation, or a clear-cut "before and after." The kind of damage that accumulates insidiously: through small decisions that, at the moment they were made, still seemed entirely reasonable; through absences that were never given a name; through a language that was always intent on circumspection—and for that very reason, always skirted just a little wide of the heart of things.
Harold is not a bad man. That is not the question the novel asks. Rather, the real question is this: What price does one pay for being the kind of person who mistakes reticence for decency—and distance for respect? And, furthermore, what price must be paid by those who stand on the other side?
New York is still there—the early hours on the Upper West Side; that particular light that reveals every surface without lending it even a hint of drama; the strangers with whom one shares a building for years without ever daring to venture the slightest thing. Yet the novel is in motion. And eventually, Harold, too, sets out.
I do not wish to reveal anything more at this stage.
What I can say, however, is this: Window with Father is a book about a man attempting to pass something on to his daughter—even before he can bring himself to admit that this is precisely his intention. And it is about everything that transpires between the moment of resolve and the moment of arrival.
It is a book about the weight of things left unsaid. And about what happens when, finally, someone takes the scales into their own hands.
Window with Father will be released shortly. Further details to follow.