Stealing Through Time: On the Writings of Jack Finney (19 page)

Lew's slow metamorphosis into a risk taker continues in the novel's fourth chapter, as he goes for his third nighttime walk. This time, he walks out onto the empty freeway and lies down in the middle of the road. Harry's wife Shirley is out walking her dog at the same time and joins Lew in the road. They kiss and he admits that he desires her. They then try to scare a passing car before going home. Lew's sexual fantasy is dashed when Shirley excitedly tells him that she wants Harry and Jo to join them on their next outing; she coins the term '"the Night People'" (291) and Lew feels a pang of sorrow at the realization that "the solitariness of his night-time walks" (291) is gone.

In chapter five, Lew tells Jo about his nighttime walks, and admits that he has '"always liked the notion of some secret way to walk off into another world'" (293), recalling the actions of the narrator in Finney's early story, "The Third Level." Living in California, he misses the snowy winters of his Illinois childhood and tells Jo that one Christmas he flew back to Chicago and went to see his parents' house. It looked different than he had remembered, however, and even though he did not go in, he was satisfied at having seen it (293-94). This attempt to return to the past puts Lew even more squarely in the line of Jack Finney's fictional characters who have done (or tried to do) the same thing; the incident also recalls a similar one in the short story "Crazy Sunday," where a young father travels to Paris on a whim and learns "that his youth wasn't still here waiting to be returned to" (246). For her part, Jo also shares an affection with many of Finney's characters in that she "'always liked the idea of a summerhouse ... the little lath and scrollwork places you'd go off to by yourself on a long 1890 kind of summer afternoon'" (294).

That night, the foursome goes for their first nighttime walk together. They end up frolicking on the freeway until a police car passes. They are concerned that he may have seen them and they observe him park at a nearby service station and get coffee. In true 1970s fashion, Harry is angry at the power the police wield over innocent citizens — '"answer questions; produce
identification,
for crysake. All that shit — I hate it'" (302). To give Jack Finney credit, though, the anti-police expressions and acts of the characters in
The Night People,
while they may seem dated and pandering to popular feelings of the 1970s, are actually extensions of behavior common to Finney's characters as far back as Tim Ryan (see "Sounds in the Night," a 1951 short story).

Although Harry fantasizes about vandalizing the police car, nothing is done and the Night People go home peacefully. Starting the next day, everyone goes back to their normal lives. Chapter six includes another scene reminiscent of an early Finney story; this time, Lew and Harry refuse to get up and visit each other on a rainy Monday night, so their wives facilitate a party by telephone. In 1957, Finney had published the story "Rainy Sunday," in which the same thing happens between two other couples, the Callandars and the Howsers. A comparison of the scene in
The Night People
with the earlier short story makes it clear that Finney had the story in hand when he wrote the novel; the entire scene is rewritten and updated, but the events and many of the words are repeated verbatim. Of interest to Finney's readers is the change that occurs when Lew sings his high school song. In "Rainy Sunday," Ben and Charley sing '"Revere old Courtland, dear old Courtland, " which earns this reply: '"their high-school song,'June murmured to Ruth. 'Can you tie that?'" (307). In
The Night People,
it is changed to '"On Proviso, on Proviso,/Fling your colors high!'" to which this reply is given: '"Their high school song,' Shirley murmured. 'Can you tie that?'" (312). The change is interesting because Jack Finney attended Proviso High School.

A close examination of
The Night People
reveals that it is an amalgam of many things that Jack Finney had done before in his fiction, with a rather clumsy attempt to update its events to the 1970s by means of casual obscenities, radical attitudes, and frank discussions of sexuality. Another Night People outing occurs in chapter six, and this time it is wilder than the last. While dancing in an empty shopping center parking lot and drinking champagne, the two couples are surprised by Floyd Pearley, the same policeman they had seen on their last outing. Pearley is portrayed as a reactionary, his behavior and speech a caricature of an ignorant policeman in contrast with the smooth, well-spo-ken Lew Joliffe. Harry is belligerent and lectures the policeman about his behavior, but Lew calms Harry down and they almost walk away before Harry's childish behavior forces a confrontation. The couples are forced to run away and escape after Pearley pulls his gun and threatens them.

To add insult to injury, the couples then go home, get high on marijuana, and take nude Polaroid pictures of each other. Unfortunately, chapter six of
The Night People
is one of the more embarrassing examples of Jack Finney's fiction, and it demonstrates why he was a much better writer when he was not trying to pander to the fashions of the times.

In chapter seven, Harry's childish behavior continues. He reveals to Lew that he printed an enlarged photograph of Lew, Jo, and Shirley in the nude and hid it in a book in the Mill Valley Library. Lew must recover the photograph before the library opens the next morning and a student discovers it. The crime is planned, and that night Lew and Jo enter the library through an unlocked back door and begin searching for the book. Accidental exposure of Lew's flashlight leads to an investigation by the police, and of course one of them is Floyd Pearley, the target of Harry and Lew's invective on their last adventure.

Lew and Jo hide from the police in a suspenseful scene and, as they escape to Harry's getaway car, Harry reveals that he has stolen the ignition keys from the police car. He tosses them out of the window into the road and a car chase ensues, but again the couples evade the police and retire to bed.

Two thirds of the way through
The Night People,
its central problems are already clear. First of all, the characters are not particularly engaging or likeable. Lew is a spoiled adult, Jo is sketchily drawn, Shirley is essentially an object for Lew's lustful thoughts, and Harry is a childish boor. Secondly, there is no real motive for their actions, other than boredom or nastiness. One gets the feeling that these are not people that one would like to meet, and the cardboard manner in which their encounters with the police occur does not engender reader sympathy. However, the novel's big set piece is yet to occur, despite the fact that it was given away in the prologue.

In chapter eight, Lew suggests climbing to the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. Before this is planned, however, there is another encounter with Officer Pearley, whose dialogue is embarrassing: '"You was the guy at the liberry, " he tells Lew. '"You flang the keys!'" (369). Though Harry and Lew walk away, the policeman arrests Shirley, leading to Harry's punching the policeman and stealing his gun. Though the couples think they have escaped and reached home safely, the police successfully track them down and Harry and Shirley are forced to evacuate their apartment and move in with Lew and Jo. Everyone decides that they will have to leave California and start life anew, but Lew and Harry vow revenge on Office Pearley and discuss Lew's plan about climbing the bridge.

In chapter nine of
The Night People,
Pearley gets closer to finding Harry and Lew as they evade his search and plan their last and greatest prank. The preparation and gathering of materials recalls similar scenes in earlier Finney novels, such as
5 Against the House
and
Assault on a Queen,
but by this point in the novel the situation has grown so ridiculous that it is hard to care about the fates of these characters.

The novel concludes in chapter ten, where the scene in the prologue finally makes sense. The two couples drive to the Golden Gate Bridge, where Harry and Lew begin their climb to the top. Oddly enough, the suspenseful pages from the prologue are not repeated, which diffuses the sense of fear that the earlier section of the novel had begun to create. The men make it to the top and then descend like mountain climbers; Jo and Shirley send up supplies by rope. Their job complete, they rejoin the women and drive to the service station where they had first seen Officer Pearley. They do things to annoy him, such as jamming the coin slots on his favorite coffee machine, then steal his police car when he arrives.

They drive to the Civic Center and use a ramp to park the police car on the building's roof, taking a Bonnie and Clyde style photograph together before leaving. The stunt makes the TV news, and the embarrassment of Officer Pearley continues as the Chief of Police makes fun of the situation, telling a reporter that Pearley '"was in hot pursuit. Of a stolen hang glider. Had him cornered up there on the roof'" (403). The comment recalls Finney's earlier story, "An Old Tune," but
The Night People
contains little of the lyricism of that earlier tale of a man reaching the top of the Golden Gate Bridge by balloon.

As the day ends, the Night People's final prank gets underway. Lew, Harry, and Shirley use three vehicles to block all four lanes of traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge. Harry hooks up a power source and Jo and Shirley pull on ropes to let down a huge white sheet that will serve as a screen. Harry then projects their life story onto the screen, to the enthrallment of those stalled in traffic on the bridge. The final shot is the one of Lew, Shirley, and Jo naked, and as the novel ends, Lew and Jo drive toward Santa Fe; she had almost decided to leave him but she has chosen to stay with him to see what will happen next.

The Night People
is a dated novel, filled with characters and situations of the mid-1970s that seem quaint and unpleasant today. It represents Jack Finney's most awkward attempt to keep up with the times, and it would be his last, since he would not publish another novel for 18 years.

Upon publication in 1977,
The Night People
was not widely reviewed.
Kirkus Reviews
commented that "this scenario would work better as a Finney short story or as a frisky film; given too many pauses between bon mots and escapades, it's easy to find the night games resistible — to become disenchanted with the second-childhooding, suspicious of motives, and impatient for Finney to probe beneath the high spirits." A
Publishers Weekly
review called the novel, "nice jaunty escapism" (Bannon), and a
Booklist
writer referred to it as a "humorous novel attractive both as snappy entertainment and social commentary," but the novel faded quickly from view after a paperback reprinting and was never filmed.

Critics writing in the decades since the novel's publication have barely mentioned it, but Finney himself referred to it in a 1995 interview, when he mentioned that he had not ever read to anyone at the Mill Valley Public Library, "not too surprising, when you consider that in 'Night People,' his 1977 novel, he explained how the average citizen could burglarize the place. 'I was concerned,' says Thelma Percy, 75, who was the head librarian then. "The instructions were explicit. We didn't want to encourage that sort of thing'" (Ickes 36). In 1999, Jon Breen wrote that "these characters ... are less endearing than the author's usual. It may be that Finney's decision (otherwise unprecedented in the novels) to write in the third person damaged the kind of tenuous reader identification needed to render his central characters likeable" (35). Fred Blosser was more impressed with the novel, writing that "
The Night People
may be most remarkable as a parable of anomie and angst in the comfortable white-collar middle class during the Ford and Carter era, comparable to the free-flowing, absurdist seventies movies of Paul Mazursky and Robert Altman" (55).

Jack Finney was 65 years old when
The Night People
was published in 1977. He had not published a short story since 1965, and he would not publish another. Despite his impressive early record for having his novels made into films, his last four novels had failed to interest Hollywood, and no film adaptation of his work had been released since
Assault on a Queen
in 1966. He would not publish another book for six years, and one may safely assume that, after
The Night People,
he was in semi-retirement.

FOURTEEN

Forgotten News: The Crime of the Century and Other Lost Stories

As the 1980s began, American society was changing. The 1970s had been a rime of upheaval, and Jack Finney's attempt to reflect the prevailing spirit had resulted in
The Night People.
The popular filmed remake of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
released in 1978, changed the tone of the original story so completely that it looked like Jack Finney's best work was out of step with the times. Yet his love of traditional values and his interest in America's past began to coincide with the return to the past being promoted by new president Ronald Reagan, and nostalgia was once again in vogue. Finney's 1970 novel
Time and Again
had continued to sell for a decade, and was well on its way to achieving cult status and popularity beyond anything else he had written. It is not surprising that his next published work would be
Forgotten News: The Crime of the Century and Other Lost Stories,
a book that hearkens back to the era explored in
Time and Again.