The Cry of the Owl
First edition
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| Author | Patricia Highsmith |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Psychological thriller, novel |
| Publisher | Harper & Row |
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Publication date
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1962 |
The Cry of the Owl is a psychological thriller novel by Patricia Highsmith, the eighth of her 22 novels. It was first published in the US in 1962 by Harper & Row and in the UK by Heinemann the following year. It explores, in the phrase of critic Brigid Brophy, "the psychology of the self-selected victim".
Highsmith wrote The Cry of the Owl between April 1961 and February 1962. She considered it to be one of her weaker efforts, calling its principal character "rather square ... a polite sitting duck for more evil characters, and a passive bore".
Highsmith drew on her own experience as a stalker, when obsessed years before with a woman she had waited on in a New York City store, events she adapted when writing The Price of Salt (1952). The setting was much like the area in which she was living in New Hope, Pennsylvania.
The book's title refers to Jenny's belief that foreboding incidents precede events in her life, which are determined by fate. She considers the owl a harbinger of death. As a man appeared before her younger brother's death years ago, so Robert's appearance foretells a death.
Highsmith ended her relationship with Marijane Meaker about the time she started work on this novel in April 1961. Meaker told an interviewer that Highsmith modeled the character of Nickie after her as an act of "retaliation".
The novel is dedicated only to "D.W.", an apparent reference to Dasiy Winston, Highsmith's former lover and neighbor in New Hope.
Following a painful divorce from his wife Nickie, Robert Forester leaves New York and moves to a Langley, Pennsylvania, a small town, where he develops an obsession for 23-year-old Jenny Thierolf. He spies on her through her kitchen window, enjoying "the girl's placid temperament, her obvious affection for her rather ramshackle house, her contentment with her life". He is surprised when she invites him into her house after spotting him one night. Each seems to represent something more for the other than it appears, to embody a larger emotional force than a mere personality. Robert explains to his therapist: "'I have the definite feeling if everybody in the world didn't keep watching to see what everybody else did, we'd all go berserk. Left on their own, people wouldn't know how to live.'"
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