Large City Book Order: 'Time and Again'

By Ginia Bellafante

10:07 p.m. | Updated Thanks to all of you who participated in the Big City Book Club this evening. If anyone has farther comments or questions, delight post them below; I'll follow upwards later in the week. And if anyone who participated is non yet a member of the Book Club mailing list and would like to bring together, send an eastward-mail to bigcity@nytimes.com with the word "Join" in the discipline heading. Nosotros'll be announcing the next book option in a few days; members will receive e-mail notification. — Ginia Bellafante

Many of you e-mailed recently expressing groovy enthusiasm for this night's Large City Book Social club choice, Jack Finney's 1970 scientific discipline-fiction thriller, "Time and Again." The novel traces the adventures of Si Morley, a Manhattan advertising artist who finds himself ensnared in a government secret ops project experimenting in time travel.

Some of you — like me — were reading it for the first fourth dimension; others had addicted memories of encountering the novel back in the day. I'd love to hear from any of you lot reading it for a 2nd or 3rd time now: how does information technology concord upwards, and how take your impressions of the volume changed?

I suspect the return customers are pleased. At that place'southward and then much ephemera in the book — about foretime apartment buildings, intersections, habits — that it nearly requires revisiting. It has a languorous quality not often associated with genre fiction. We're in a zone here free of heavy-handed end-of-chapter cliffhangers. Does anyone know if the writing mode — tranquility and wonderfully attentive to detail — is one Finney deployed in his before well-known novel, "The Trunk Snatchers" (the basis for the more pointedly titled moving-picture show, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"), or if it is a style into which he matured?

The early segments of the book, set in Finney'southward nowadays day, certainly paint a less glamorous picture of the New York advertising world than that to which we've been exposed in "Mad Men." Things seem tedious and lifeless, the piece of work itself far less inventive. At 28, Morley seems as bored equally if he were 50. When the government taps him to travel back to the New York of 1882 — providing him with an opportunity to investigate a mysterious letter in the possession of his girlfriend — it seems like a perfectly sound alternative to illustrating soap campaigns promising a "lovelier, lathery you." (This is not the land of Don Draper's transporting Kodak Carousel work, or even for that matter his Snoball pitch.)

What struck me near the volume was how it gets at the power of nostalgia for things nosotros oasis't experienced. While Finney was writing, New York was deteriorating — criminal offence and poverty were roaring. These issues were even more pronounced in the late 19th century, when the stench alone might have driven y'all away, simply Finney focuses on the pastoral qualities of life in the city then more intensely than he concerns himself with the decay. New York, in his envisioning, was for the most part a Christmas story of snow and sleigh bells. The mayhem and privation certainly catch his attention — children forced to sleep riverside — but don't concord information technology; he seems convinced that what was, was indeed far better.

This is just what many of us today believe most New York in the '70s: that the city was more vibrant then, not yet deadened by a sense of suburban safety and toxic materialism. Information technology was amazing to meet during the renewed search for Etan Patz, several weeks ago, that many referred to the child's disappearance in 1979 as a turning point in the fashion they viewed the city. Later they could no longer think of it every bit an innocent identify, as though the city wasn't already amidst the more dangerous places in the country.

In that location are then many incredible details of New York in the 1880s — I'll leave it to you all to cite your favorites. The Dakota wasn't still completed in 1882, but here Finney takes license and surrounds the historic apartment building with sheep and farmland. Information technology's fun to encounter the Dakota pictured every bit a kind of sky in 1970 when 2 years earlier Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby" imagined it equally birthplace to the devil'southward offspring, a symbol of a corrosive sell-your-soul kind of ambition that certainly seems more potent in the urban center today than it did so.

Thematically, though, Finney is near interested in the part of government intervention in the lives of people and places. The book is both implicitly and explicitly about the follies of Vietnam and the American temptation to aggressively manage the world stage. In the novel, government lackeys want to reorder the past to foreclose a Communist Cuba. It'southward a sly narrative turn that elevates the book beyond its elegiac mood.

So on to the plot, which does get meaty: Pickering-Carmody! Julia versus Kate! Cryptic letters! And some slights at Mormonism. Discuss.