The Cry of the Owl by Patricia Highsmith

Not sure why but this is my favorite picture of Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith's 1962 novel The Cry of the Owl provokes anxiety in the reader from the outset, and that feeling doesn't let up until the very end. You may find that it doesn't even let up for a while after the end.

Review

Robert Forester has moved from New York to a small town in Pennsylvania where he has taken a job as a draftsman for an aeronautical engineering company. Robert is getting divorced from Nikki. It was a short, unhappy marriage, and he feels depressed, lonely, and at loose ends living in a strange town. One night he happens to drive past a house where he glimpses a pretty young woman in her kitchen. For reasons he doesn't quite understand, he's so taken with the scene that he turns his car around, parks down the block, and walks over to stand in the shadows and watch her through the window. 

As time goes by, Robert becomes addicted to watching the woman (and her boyfriend) through the front windows of her house. The young woman's name is Jenny; her boyfriend is Greg. They've been together for a while and seem to be moving toward a formal engagement. Robert has no intentions toward Jenny. He doesn't want to hurt her or have sex with her or even meet her. Just watching her gives him a sense of calm and well-being. More than once, however, when he's moving around in the shadows he accidentally makes noises that lead her to think there may be a prowler outside. Sometimes she sends her boyfriend out to search the property; but Robert always manages to avoid getting caught.

After a while, Robert realizes he has to stop peeking into Jenny's house. If he gets caught, he would likely be arrested. He could lose his job. His soon-to-be-ex-wife would ridicule him. One evening he goes over to Jenny's house for what he tells himself will be the last time. As he watches, Jenny comes out of the house with some trash that she dumps into a container and sets on fire. As she stands there contemplating the blaze, Robert falls into a reverie watching her... until he realizes Jenny is looking right at him. He awkwardly spreads his hands and says hello. She asks him if he is the prowler she keeps hearing. He admits he is but promises he'll leave and not come back. A conversation ensues, and Jenny eventually invites him into her house. They talk for a long time and lay the first foundations of a friendship.

As time goes by, Jenny confesses that she's not sure she loves Greg enough to marry her. Robert understands but impresses on her that he is not interested in a romantic relationship; nevertheless, she begins to fall in love with him. Greg doesn't take well to being dumped. When Jenny can't explain how she met Robert, Greg becomes convinced that Robert was the prowler and that he's some kind of dangerous kook. As he goes through various machinations trying to scare Robert away, Greg eventually gets in touch with Nikki to try to learn more about him. Nikki, not to put too fine a point on it, is a perverse narcissist who takes pleasure in destroying other people's lives. So, of course, she gleefully feeds Greg everything he wants to hear. 

One night Greg runs Robert off the road in a lonely stretch of highway that goes by the river. They get into a fight, and, although Greg is the bigger of the two, Robert has had military training and holds his own. At one point they tumble down the bank into the river, where Greg apparently hits his head on some rocks and becomes groggy. Robert pulls him out of the water and leaves him sitting on the river bank. He drives away to meet Jenny, and he tells her what happened.

This is the point at which the story makes a big turn. Greg's abandoned car is found by the river the next day, but Greg never shows up. Robert goes to the police and tells them what happened. But days and weeks go by, and Greg is never seen again. Suspicion falls harder and harder on Robert that the version of the story he told isn't true, that Greg ended up in the river drowned. Maybe it was manslaughter; maybe it was deliberate murder. In his efforts to break up Jenny and Robert, Greg had told the prowler story to anyone and everyone who would listen. People begin to wonder about Robert's character. Even Jenny begins to wonder. Weeks later a badly decomposed body washes up downriver. Robert's life spirals more and more into a hell of uncertainty and suspicion, and even attempts on his life. 

Throughout the book, Robert remains a decent person. He isn't a good man turned bad, like, say, Guy Haines in Strangers on a Train. Instead, he's an innocent who keeps unintentionally causing bad things to happen to innocent people, who has enemies who want to destroy him for no good reason, and who almost everyone comes to regard with hostility and distrust. Because Highsmith has done a brilliant job of putting you in Robert's shoes, you squirm anxiously with every twist and turn of the narrative.

Paradoxically, you race from chapter to chapter just to find out how much worse things can get. Robert comes off as a two-dimensional character, but I believe Highsmith made him that way to emphasize the idea that the universe is fundamentally indifferent to our moral character. 

As for how it all works out, I will only say that the book does finally climax in a glorious Grand Guignol blood fest that is quite satisfying. 

Parts of this book are a bit mystifying. You may feel some sympathy toward Robert even as he becomes a Peeping Tom because you understand his loneliness and pain. But when he inadvertently gains Jenny's love, inexplicably he doesn't want it. He just wanted to admire her from a distance, nothing more. He seems almost asexual. He's coming off of a bad marriage, but his ex-wife Nikki wasn't just a bad match for him. She is actually one of the most hateful characters in literature. Her vindictiveness and cruelty exceed all limits of rationality, making Medea seem placid in comparison. 

Unlike Roland Barthes, I think knowing a few details about the author's life can sometimes help you appreciate a book. Here are a few tidbits via biographer Joan Schenkar. 

Highsmith was once smitten by a pretty young blonde and spied on her voyeuristically. As her misanthropy increased, Highsmith eventually found that she enjoyed looking at pictures of attractive women but had no interest in actual relationships with them, just as Robert enjoyed admiring Jenny in the window but wanted nothing else from her.  

Highsmith had a two-year affair with another author, the lesbian pulp fiction writer Marijane Meaker, who wrote under the pen name Vin Packer. Highsmith was extremely bitter over their breakup, and the hideous Nikki is probably a projection of Highsmith's feelings about Meaker. 

Nightfall by David Goodis

You can't escape the fickle finger of fate?

You may remember a bestselling nonfiction book that came out back in 1981 called When Bad Things Happen to Good People in which a rabbi gives advice on dealing with grief. Separated from its context, I've always felt that title sums up what a lot of noir fiction is all about. As for why bad things happen to good people, noir's answer is: there is no why, shit just happens.

Review

Cornell Woolrich, whom some credit with inventing noir, was the master of plots built around the random, meaningless accident that changes a life -- a brick falls off a building and robs a man of his memory, a whiskey bottle thrown from a plane kills another man's fiancé, and so on. And to be honest, some of those people bad things happen to weren't so good to begin with. Just unlucky.

David Goodis, the author of Nightfall, was also an accomplished master of stories about the noir twist of fate. In this novel, the protagonist, Jim Vanning, pulls off the highway to help the survivors of an automobile accident. But the men in that roadside accident just stole $300,000 from a bank, and it turns out they are going to be needing a little more help from Vanning than he had bargained for -- and they'll get it at gunpoint. That's what being a Good Samaritan gets you in the noir universe.

Jim expects to die before his involvement in the getaway is over. But then he's confronted with an opportunity to escape that seems too good to be true. It is, of course, a setup. But the setup goes wrong, Jim shoots and kills one of the criminals in self-defense, and he really does escape -- with the satchel full of thousand-dollar bills.

While there are violent scenes and some bareknuckle fights, Nightfall can't be called a hardboiled action novel. Goodis injects too much existential handwringing and philosophical pondering for this to be anyone's idea of fast-paced. That said, though, it's a twisty little tale that keeps your attention for the two or three hours it takes to read. My only complaint is that the story relies on my least favorite plot device, amnesia, and, to make it worse, I really believe Goodis could have made the story work without that crutch.

Nightfall was published in 1947 but feels surprisingly modern for a crime novel of the era. Sure, Jim is a war vet, everybody smokes cigarettes like there's no such thing as cancer, and traditional gender roles are taken for granted. But there's little in the way of macho posturing or misogyny. The wife of the detective who's after Jim is the detective's greatest ally and confidant, and Jim longs for nothing but marriage and a family. Even the villain, "John," is clearly a man who's been wounded by life; he doesn't want to kill anyone, he just wants the money so he can sail away from all this grief with his girlfriend, and never come back.

John won't get that break. But here's where Goodis breaks with the true noir tradition: in the end Jim has a glimmer of hope.