The New Couple in 5B

Throughout The New Couple in 5B, protagonist Rosie Lowan struggles to reconcile her rationalist worldview with the belief in magic and the supernatural that was ingrained in her at a young age by her family. At the beginning of the novel, she rejects her con artist father’s belief in magic and the supernatural, seeing it as part of a strategy of deception he used to exploit her and others. By the end of the novel, however, she has accepted that not everything she experiences can be explained by science. Rosie describes her mother and father as “tricksters, frauds, con artists, preying on the most vulnerable” in their small town in the Ozarks by pretending to be able to heal illnesses and tell fortunes (98). Rosie’s parents raised her and her sister Sarah to believe that they also had magic powers. Rosie explains that “my father called me a seer,” someone who “glimpses into the future, who receives messages or visions” (111). Similarly, her sister Sarah “was what my father called a dreamer, the visions she had while she slept very often coming to pass” (67). The repeated use of the phrase “my father called” in these passages suggests that, at this stage in the narrative, Rosie does not share her father’s belief in magic and the supernatural.

Rosie’s experiences while writing about and living in the Windermere help to change her belief in supernatural forces. Her research at the Windermere—a supposedly haunted building in which numerous suspicious deaths have occurred—aims to answer the question of whether “cursed or haunted places” really exist or whether the tragedies stem from a more pedestrian cause: “[B]roken people doing horrible things to each other” (17). Almost immediately after arriving at the Windermere, Rosie has visions of a young boy, later revealed to be her neighbor’s late son, who died tragically in the apartment. Rosie and her psychologist initially dismiss these sightings as “visual or auditory hallucinations” related to the trauma of her religious upbringing (158). However, Rosie’s visions persist and become more vivid, culminating in a vision of Willa Winter telling her that she is in danger. Rosie recognizes this vision as true, and she acts on it to ensure her safety. At the end of the novel, Rosie’s father asks her whether she still believes he “lied about the world out there” and about her role as a seer (378). Rosie responds that she believes “there’s more in heaven and earth […] than either one of us will ever know” (378), suggesting that she is no longer able to fully reject her father’s belief in magic and the supernatural.