The Sitter opens with a tableau, a scene detailed meticulously from both sides of a window in a hotel room in Paris. It’s not clear, at first, precisely who is looking, registering these details, nor where they might be positioned: all the reader is given is the image, piece by piece.
This only lasts a moment, but it’s a clever way to begin – unsettling and strangely distancing, but also emblematic of so many of the novel’s interests and what it attempts to do. The Sitter is, in many ways, a book about looking and being looked at, about depiction and all that it might mean. That this opening scene places the reader somewhere ambiguous and slippery, simultaneously within and external to what is being observed, is a skilful gambit and one that resonates across the rest of the novel.
