The Cry of the Owl (Highsmith, Patricia) [Paperback]

Patricia Highsmith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 18, 1994 | Series: Highsmith, Patricia

This “extraordinary story” (Julian Symons) begins with an act of naive voy­eurism. Robert Forester, a depressed but fundamentally decent man, liked to watch Jenny through her kitchen window—a harmless palliative, as he saw it, to his lonely life and failed marriage. As he is drawn into her life, however, the recriminations of his simple pleasure shatter the deceptive calm of this small Pennsylvania town. With striking clarity and horrible inevitability, Forester is caught up in a series of deaths in which he is the innocent bystander, presumed guilty. Highsmith has once again, as Graham Greene wrote, “created a world of her own—a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger.” And that sense of danger grows from the first page to the sinister and chilling conclusion.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Patricia Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1921 but moved to New York when she was six. In her senior year she edited the college magazine, having decided to become a writer at the age of sixteen. Her first novel Strangers on a Train was made into a famous film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. Patricia Highsmith died in Locarno, Switzerland in 1995. Her last novel Small g: A Summer Idyll was published posthumously just over a month later --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press (January 18, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871132907
• ISBN-13: 978-0871132901
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #887,588 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) was the author of more than twenty novels, including Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt and The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as numerous short stories.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

71 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Hidden Darkness of the Ordinary Man, April 18, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Cry of the Owl (Highsmith, Patricia) (Paperback)

Patricia Highsmith has her own chilling interpretation of the suspense thriller genre. You wonder not so much about what will happen or how it will happen or who will do it. Rather, the question is: how much worse can things get for the relatively innocent main character, Robert Forrester, who, as the novel goes on, is falsely suspected of a growing number of deaths.

Forrester invites suspicion by prowling around the house of a young woman. Depressed by the failure of his marraige, he has moved to a small Pennsylvannia town and is leading a solitary and bleak life. Looking through the windows of Jenny's house, he is comforted by watching the attractive young woman attend to domestic details: cooking, hanging curtains, talking to her boyfriend over dinner.

Highsmith presents Forrester's prowling as understandable; slightly wrong, and risky, yet certainly not harmful. Mostly one feels sympathy for Forrester, a character drawn in anguished shades of gray. He is a decent man, with no drive or hope, seeking a little illicit happiness.

As the novel progresses, his relationship to Jenny takes a surprising turn of events. Highsmith's mastery lies in the pedestrian inevitability with which she introduces abnormal and even shocking twists of the plot. Because we are lulled into Highsmith's own distinctive world of the darkness of ordinary lives, our anxiety for Forrester is gradually heightened without our even being aware of it. By the time the plot gets around to the events which categorize the novel as a mystery, we are deeply engaged in the psychologies of Forrester and Jenny, as well as several other characters.

The suspense thus springs from their own interior struggles, rather than the machinations of a conventional murder plot. Predictably, therefore, there are no easy solutions in the end, no complex train of events to be tied up in one simple explanation.

The adding up of the actions of people who are no more conscious of why they do what they do than any regular person, has, in this novel, an utterly gripping and painfully believable tragic outcome.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Chilling, October 8, 2000

By 

Dan Seitz "cinnatusc" (Somerville, MA, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Cry of the Owl (Highsmith, Patricia) (Paperback)

This book is one of the few books I've ever read, especially in mystery, that gave me a serious case of the creeps. It's not just suspenseful, it's scary. The book has aged, but not dated; if anything I found Highsmith's characters even more disturbing in light of how social mores and psychological knowledge has advanced. But what's ultimately scary about it is that what happens to our hero, Robert Forester, is something that could very easy happen to anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time. Read it, it's brilliant.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Didn't really live up to its promise, December 17, 2002

By 

leonie jordan (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cry of the Owl (Highsmith, Patricia) (Paperback)

This is the first Patricia Highsmith novel I've read, and all things considered I probably should have started with one of her more popular titles. I did enjoy the book, but thought the action fizzled out a bit about halfway through. It started really well. I liked Robert, I liked the cosy domestic idyll Jenny represented for him, but I got disappointed when they actually got to know each other, and found that the reality of their relationship paled beside his fantasy.
I found Nikkie somewhat unbelievable - could someone so theatrically cruel really exist and would someone like Robert ever be blind enough to marry her? Hopefully not. I also thought Greg's transformation from clean-cut, stable, all-American nice guy to a gun-wielding, porn-viewing maniac a little too radical. If Highsmith was trying to invert our assumptions about Robert and Greg and make a point about appearance and reality she should probably have done so with a little more subtlety.
I expected the plot to take a completely different arc to what it did - did anyone else latch on to the comment Jenny made towards the beginning of the book about how accusing a man falsely of rape was the worst crime a woman could commit? I thought that this was an indicator of how the story would proceed, and felt a little cheated when it turned out to have no bearing on the plot at all.
Having said all that, Highsmith did a wonderful job of creating an atmosphere of tension and nervous expectation, as my completely eroded cuticles will testify. It's a book that has an almost physiological effect on you - you actually experience what the characters feel, rather than using your imagination to try and simulate the experience. The ending is particularly good in this regard as it gives no closure, but instead allows the sense of despair and horror to continue after the book has been closed. This makes it a rather uncomfortable read I suppose, as most people can do without palpitations, a dry throat, and a sense of mounting panic. It takes an incredibly talented writer to make you want to go through such a disquieting experience again, but I certainly do. I will definitely read another Patricia Highsmith novel, and will hopefully find it even better than this one.