"Hey! Allie Jones?"
She stared into his face. A short guy in his mid-thirties, with curly, sandy-colored hair and uptilted green eyes. There was something vague and a little wild about those eyes, a touch of dangerous disorientation. His flesh was freckled and ruddy, and though there was a fullness to his cheeks, his legs and the torso beneath the windbreaker were very thin, almost emaciated. The wrists protruding from the turned-up sleeves were bony and fragile. Allie knew she´d never seen him before. She said, "Sorry..."
He looked scared and unsure of himself for a moment, then said, "Listen, I´m ready." His words were slightly slurred.
"Ready?"
"You know. To do what we talked about." He glanced around. Grinned. They were coconspirators. "What we decided at Wild Red´s. I wasn´t as shtoned as you might think. I always said I´d try anything at least once, then give it a second go-round. That´s always been my motto, you might shay."
Confused, Allie backed away, "You and I never talked about anything."
About the Book
When they made a movie based on John Lutz´s SWF Seeks Same, they changed the title somewhat. Single White Female is the name of the now-famous 1992 film starring Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh, but in some ways, the original title serves the story better. The novel and film both are about sameness, about one person wanting to be the same as another, encroaching upon and, at times, actually usurping the other´s identity. When Allie Jones, searching for a new roommate, places the add "SWF seeks same" in the New York Times, she has no idea how apt, and how chilling, that line will come to seem.
The new roommate is Hedra, a diffident, somewhat homely woman whose deferential nature Allie imagines will be an appealing quality in a new roommate. Hedra, however, begins to wreak her havoc only after she has been invited inside. Her undisguised admiration for Allie soon begins to seem something more like idolatry, and Allie is distressed when she returns home unexpectedly one day to find Hedra trying on her clothes. But this is, of course, just the beginning. Inexplicable things begin to happen in Allie´s life, including a series of obscene phone calls and an odd run-in with a strange man on the street, and it doesn´t take long for her to link these occurrences to the bizarre, obsessive Hedra.
Encroachment is one of this novel´s most dominant themes and Lutz does a splendid job of creating an atmosphere of claustrophobic paranoia. From coincidental encounters on the street and in restaurants to all manner of intrusive phone calls to Hedra´s almost constant presence in the apartment, Allie´s life seems boxed in, and New York City seems surprisingly small and menacing. She feels both anonymous and specifically targeted, a feeling brought about by Hedra´s actions but also reinforced throughout the book by the seemingly predatory nature of many of the people who cross Allie´s path. One of the best things Lutz does in this book is to keep the intentions of the male characters inscrutable; they appear to us as they appear to Allie, and the result is that even the friendly, boyish next-door neighbor arouses our suspicions, and contributes to the air of paranoia we cannot help but breathe with her.
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