A Mysterious Tale of Subject and Viewer, Artfully Arranged

For desperate Manhattan apartment seekers, it shimmers like a mirage, the classified ad a man who calls himself “Jefferson” runs every summer: “Prime location, SoHo sublet. July 1 to Sept. 1. Pristine 1 BR. Hrdwd flrs. Air-con. $400/mo.”

It’s not a mirage, though; it’s bait. The apartment is just as good as advertised, but the rent is low for a reason: Applications flood in, and Jefferson can choose his tenant--always an attractive, single woman.

Jefferson, the narrator of David Knowles’ first novel, is rich but alienated and, he believes, physically ugly. Now in his 30s, he has substituted voyeurism for a normal social life.

“I’d started to register the everyday world first and foremost in terms of aesthetics. Eventually, I found myself powerless to distinguish between art and real life.”

He lives in a building that overlooks the apartment he rents out, trains a telephoto lens on it through a peephole and snaps candid pictures of each tenant--capturing, he theorizes pretentiously, an immediacy no artist’s model could provide. He gives the photos to a painter friend, Henry, who copies them in “portraits” that have begun to attract favorable notice.

Jefferson doesn’t molest his tenants. This isn’t, it turns out, a novel of escalating depravity like Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho,” although Knowles, a suave and clever writer, at first leads us to expect exactly that. Instead, it’s a story of obsessiveness and control--freakishness that’s chilling because of its very detachment.

One tenant, a naive country girl, is assaulted by a drunken date. Jefferson, watching, phones the apartment, scaring the man off. His motives, however, are less than altruistic: “To me it was a question of subject matter. I didn’t fill the apartment to watch a woman get raped. I wanted a more subtle piece than that.” Jefferson talks a lot about “framing” his tenants. He means the word in its artistic sense, but we’re reminded of its detective-novel sense as well. Somebody who is “framed” in a criminal case has been inserted into a life not his own, made to act in a story of somebody else’s devising. Jefferson finds a way to let each of these women know, when her two months are up, that she has been watched--and used.

Clearly, he’s due for a fall. It comes in the form of his latest tenant, Maya Vanasi, a lovely and self-possessed young Indian woman who has a red Hindu dot, or bindi, on her forehead. This “third eye,” he learns, has mystical significance. Indeed, Maya’s ability to stay out of range of Jefferson’s lens and to frustrate his plans verges on the supernatural.

Although newly arrived in the United States, she has somehow managed to befriend the owners of a gallery that’s about to exhibit Henry’s paintings. If she sees them, Jefferson realizes, she will recognize the apartment, know she too is being watched and call the police. He tries to get Henry to cancel the exhibit, but Henry, tired of being patronized and bossed by Jefferson, rebels.

Knowles convincingly takes us through the stages of Jefferson’s disintegration. The armor of his aestheticism falls away piece by piece, exposing him to real feelings: love, fear, helplessness. “The Third Eye,” packaged as a nasty little thriller, emerges as a story of moral recovery.

For readers, this isn’t an entirely pleasant surprise. Knowles gets high marks for ingenuity, originality and narrative skill, but Maya eludes us as much as she eludes Jefferson: We have nothing but the supernatural to fall back on when we try to figure out who she is and how she was able, so thoroughly and so neatly, to frame the framer.