The Confessions of Sandy Roberts

Although the narrator of The Confessions of Sandy Roberts feels exiled from enjoyment, life, in all of its frenzied fervour and cruelty, still comes crashing in, unbidden and uninvited.

Sandy Roberts is a thirtysomething loner who works in an office alone and lives alone in a recently rented apartment in a section of the city where Sandy knows no one. Sandy is not a deliberate voyeur, like Alfred Hitchcock's L. B. Jefferies in Rear Window (1954), looking through his telephoto camera lenses; rather, Sandy is an inadvertent voyeur, who, despite renouncing company, cannot not notice and reflect upon the lives of others. During a heatwave, Sandy cannot help but witness passionate life and violent death, or as Sandy puts it, In the everyday course of events there are two things one rarely sees, if ever: one, two people having sex (i.e., live) and, two, a dead body (i.e., live); on that day, the Sunday, I saw both. Sandy is drawn into a mystery, despite efforts to live a solitary existence and avoid the berserk drama of other people.