When No One Is Watching

by Alyssa Cole

September 15, 2020 · William Morrow

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I should couch this review with the admission that I am the biggest scaredy cat. I don’t usually read romance thrillers, let alone straight ahead thrillers with only a little bit of lovin. Not only do I need to be promised a happy ending, I also want the beginning and middle to be fairly cheerful and absent of conflict. I am, admittedly, a bit ridiculous, but yes, I would prefer to be wrapped up in a blanket of love with periodic stops with ladies kicking ass. Which is all to say that I approached this book with the expectation that the general thriller nature would require me to (metaphorically) read this through my scaredy cat fingers.

I was not wrong, but I also devoured When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole in one sitting, both because I needed to know how it ended and because once it was clear what the book was trying to do and be — an allegory on the inextricably intertwined nature of White Supremacy, capitalism, the built environment, and power — I wanted to see if the book could pull it off.

It did.

When No One is Watching is an engaging mystery thriller that quickly escalates as it seeks to answer two seemingly unrelated questions: what is the history of Sydney’s childhood neighborhood and, as she and that neighborhood face the realities of gentrification that are very literally knocking on their front doors, where exactly are her former neighbors going after they leave? Grounded in the uncomfortable reality of historical fact and complicated by two unreliable narrators, When No One is Watching is filled with twists, dead bodies, and betrayal, and also a reminder that American history is bleaker still.

Sydney is a Black woman newly returned to the Brooklyn neighborhood where she grew up, both to recover from an abusive marriage and to care for her ill mother. The community is in the beginning stages of gentrification and to the recently divorced Sydney seeking solace in the place of her childhood, these changes are not just frustrating, they are incredibly destabilizing.

Sydney is recovering from a marriage where her partner gaslit her, abusing her constantly and profoundly. She spends much of the book not sure if she’s right, not sure if she’s overreacting, and yet cognizant that it was her partner’s behavior that has made it such that she doesn’t trust herself. As one of two narrators, Sydney is heartbreakingly and realistically unreliable, obfuscating her past even to herself and perpetually questioning her perception of the events that she just witnessed. Sydney feels like danger is everywhere and she distrusts everyone, including herself.

All of that second guessing and self doubt leaves Sydney weary to her bones and she takes it out on the nearest White boy stupid enough to think that his desire to make friends with her would automatically shield him from the sharp edges of her personality and the brittle thoughts she can’t stop from escaping her exhausted mind.

Theo is Sydney’s new neighbor who moved into the community with his girlfriend. Theo’s relationship with his girlfriend is weird and strained and they’ve essentially broken up in the time it takes to close on a house and move in. Since then he has spent a fair bit of time hanging out in the attic of their new home, doing his best impression of James Stewart in Rear Window. He’s lonely, he’s bored, and he’s broke. And he’s also the other unreliable narrator.

Theo clings to an aggressive innocuousness that Sydney does not trust for a second, but when he volunteers at a community meeting to help her with some research on the neighborhood as part of a tour she wants to do, she doesn’t feel like she can refuse. Like Sydney, he is working to hide from and deny his past and his present, leaving the reader to wonder what exactly he’s leaving out as the story develops.

There’s so much that I enjoyed about this book even as I had to pause to take deep cleansing breaths at some of the racist nonsense that happens (someone tell my therapist I’m totally listening to her!). Many of the neighbors were a delight! There are some adorable old-timers with secrets of their own and families with teenagers jokingly obsessed with rumors of mole people snatching residents off the streets. Not all of the new arrivals are starkly painted as enemies to the existing community. Their varying levels of cluelessness and complicity provide them with more dimension, especially when the community interacts in the Nextdoor-esque app conversations that often close each chapter.

But what really shone for me was how the reveals, both as Sydney and Theo learn about the history of the community and as they discover the underlying current-day conspiracy, are rooted in the racist realities of American history. I’m working EXTREMELY HARD not to spoil a thing here because I loved every moment when Sydney learned another nugget of local history, but more than once I was like, OH SHIT the book is really gonna go there! This is an unrelenting and intentionally stark exploration of the machinations of White Supremacy embedded within a compelling thriller. The horror of this story is that this fiction is not so far from fact. I loved every second of it!

In the midst of the national reckoning with our racist past and as folks figure out how to see and change their own complicity in our racist present, lots of people have turned to really smart and insightful antiracist nonfiction books to help them unlearn their poisonous inheritance. Which is great (support local independent bookstores!). But learning about antiracism and oppression doesn’t need to be confined to nonfiction work and it doesn’t need to exclusively be a punishing slog of self-recrimination. When No One Is Watching is a fantastic example of how much a reader can learn about history from a work of fiction when a skilled author bases an engaging story in historical facts. Knowing how to change our future as a country must necessarily start from understanding our past. I cannot wait to get my hands on the final version of this book to take a look at the additional historical resources that were relied upon.

I do think that this book struggles a bit with the competing interests of two different kinds of audiences: the audience that is familiar with the history underpinning the narrative, the critiques of gentrification, and the love for the types of communities now lost to the ravenous maw of gentrification; and the audience that has a less extensive exposure to those ideas and who may also need to be convinced about how this fictional story relates to reality. It’s a tough line to walk. I’ve seen other creators take a stance that they are only creating for one of those audiences and if other people can follow along and be engaged, that’s great. In When No One is Watching, the two narrators attempt to bridge that gap, but despite their differences, Sydney and Theo do ultimately come from the same place of ignorance of the larger systems that have existed across time. They both in their own ways serve as proxies for an audience that is on the path of knowledge seeking with them.

Which leaves me a little uncertain on how to review this book because I am ultimately not the primary audience. I simply cannot tell if my experience of the book is a universal one. I cannot tell if it matters that the words “White Supremacy” are not anywhere in this book. Because that is what this book is about: it’s about all the systems of White Supremacy, intractable, insidious, and invisible until you are the one struggling to breathe. It’s about White people working hard as they stay rich and get richer by conspiring to annihilate communities of color in order to maintain a hierarchy in which they are at the top. But can an audience not primed to see the effects of White Supremacy in so many of the systems that permeate our lives grasp that argument without explicitly being led to it? This book does a good job of identifying the symptoms of oppression, but I think that it hopes that the reader will get to the root causes on their own. And perhaps in my delight of the existence of this book and the story it dares to tell, I want it to do more than is fair for a single book, but ultimately I wonder if it goes far enough.

One of the reasons I could get through this book, as anxious as thrillers make me, is because once I recognized the story that was being told, I knew a lot of what the twists would be. My response to most of the reveals were along the lines of, YUP not surprised. I know this story already.

So really, my issue is perhaps with my own unfair expectations and also with the gap that currently exists between the leftist antiracist organizing community and the rest of the world. Some of us have been having the conversation for generations and I’ve gotten a little tired of waiting for the world to catch up. This book identifies the symptoms of oppression while I’m looking to discuss the root causes. But that’s also where Sydney is — she spends the book running around collecting these symptoms, seeing the way that White Supremacy acts. Which for me means she is a proxy for the reader who is not as aware of the dialectical framework underpinning the fight to dismantle White Supremacy. Which is fine! But it also means that I’m not the audience here, as much as I enjoyed the ride. Mostly I just yearn for the moment when we are all having the same conversation and speaking plainly about the root causes of systemic oppression. I look forward to hearing how other people experience the story!

When No One Is Watching is not the typical book I would have chosen for myself, but I’m so glad that I went with my knee jerk reaction to hearing that Alyssa Cole had written a gentrification thriller. It’s a delight, it’s really scary, it surprised me with lots of fun (read: sad and enraging) history facts. This book is ultimately about White Supremacy. If that makes you uncomfortable, you should read it, and if that makes you wonder if Christmas has come early (what is time even at this point?) you should also read it. Either way you are getting a thrilling read, filled with a dizzying sense of paranoia that infects the reader as much as it does Sydney. Come for the thriller, stay because you’ll learn more than you expect, I promise.