The Cry of the Owl

Robert Forester stands on the lawn outside a young woman’s house each evening, watching her move around her kitchen. He has recently separated from his wife, is recovering from some kind of breakdown, and has moved to a small Pennsylvania town to try to rebuild. He watches Jenny Thierolf not out of desire but out of something harder to name: a hunger for the domestic warmth that her lit kitchen represents and his own life currently lacks.

Jenny discovers him. And here is where the novel becomes strange: she is not frightened. She is interested. She invites him in. Their relationship develops, her boyfriend becomes dangerous, and then there is a death — and the question of who caused it becomes a matter of social consensus rather than fact.

The Cry of the Owl is Highsmith in her most Kafkaesque mode: a novel about a man whose perfectly ordinary actions are systematically misread until he himself can no longer be certain of the boundary between what he did and what everyone believes he did. The social machinery of accusation — the certainty of neighbours, ex-wives, police — grinds Robert down not through legal process but through the sheer weight of everyone else’s conviction.

Reading Guides

• Patricia Highsmith Books in Order
• Where to Start with Patricia Highsmith

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set The Cry of the Owl apart: The social machinery of accusation and innocence is brilliantly rendered; Robert’s helplessness in the face of others’ certainty is genuinely unsettling; and One of her best studies in how reality can be collectively constructed against one person. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of The Cry of the Owl give it weight beyond its surface narrative. How innocence offers no protection when others are certain of guilt. The gap between what happened and what people believe happened. Highsmith’s Kafka-like interest in guilt without act. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

Craft and Construction

What lifts The Cry of the Owl above the competent is the control Patricia Highsmith exercises over pacing and information. The reader is never ahead of the story, but neither is the mystery artificially maintained by withholding plausible deductions. The solution arrives feeling earned rather than arbitrary — the definitive test of plot construction in crime and thriller fiction.

Limitations

Jenny’s behaviour strains credibility in places. Less celebrated than her major works. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Highsmith fans; readers of psychological crime fiction

Suburban Observation and Its Costs

The Cry of the Owl was published in 1962 and belongs to the strand in Highsmith’s work — Deep Water, This Sweet Sickness, The Blunderer — that locates its psychopathology not in Europe or in the criminal world but in the American suburb. Robert Forester, recently separated, drives out of his way to watch a young woman through her kitchen window as she goes about her evening. He watches Jenny Thierolf repeatedly, not approaching her, finding the domestic ordinariness of what she does consoling in a way he cannot fully explain. When he finally introduces himself and tells her what he has been doing, she is not alarmed — she is fascinated.

The 2009 Film Adaptation

The Cry of the Owl was adapted as a British-French film in 2009, directed by Jamie Thraves and starring Paddy Considine as Robert and Julia Stiles as Jenny. The film updates the setting from Highsmith’s early-1960s American suburb to contemporary Britain. Considine is particularly well-suited to the specific kind of Highsmith protagonist — the man who is not violent by nature but whose presence seems to catalyse violence in others — and the adaptation was reasonably well-received. Highsmith’s title refers to the belief, traditional in parts of rural America, that an owl’s cry presages death; the novel uses it as a casual image of doom that the characters half-joke about without understanding how seriously to take it.

Robert Forester and Highsmith’s Passive Protagonists

Robert Forester belongs to a type that Highsmith returns to throughout her work: the man who does nothing wrong, in any active sense, and yet finds himself in circumstances that the world reads as guilt. He is not violent, not deceptive, not predatory — and yet his watching of Jenny is a transgression, his presence in her life catalyses a series of events he cannot control, and the social machinery of accusation — the ex-wife who knows he is capable of bad things, the police who find his story implausible, the neighbours who have decided — operates entirely independently of what he actually did. This passivity is not weakness in the ordinary sense; it is a constitutional inability to perform the aggressive innocence that the social world demands of people who are being accused. Highsmith understood that in the court of public opinion, protesting one’s innocence requires a kind of theatre that some people are simply not equipped to perform, and that the people least equipped to perform it tend to be the people most constitutionally honest. Robert’s helplessness is not moral failure but the failure of a particular personality type to master a social skill that should not be required of innocent people but is. The Cry of the Owl is the novel in which this observation is developed most fully and most bleakly.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 3.9/5 — One of Highsmith’s most Kafkaesque novels — a man whose perfectly explicable actions are misread by everyone around him until he loses his grip on what he actually did and didn’t do.