THREE BY FINNEY

Rating:
Summary: Not as good as his others
Review: I bought this book because I liked the other Finney novels. This was dissappointing. He is reaching for his alternative worlds. The concepts are great, but the execution is weaker than his other books. I still like Finney, and I guess I can tell him that if I can get the damn time machine to work on schedule.

Rating:
Summary: Not as good as his others
Review: I bought this book because I liked the other Finney novels. This was dissappointing. He is reaching for his alternative worlds. The concepts are great, but the execution is weaker than his other books. I still like Finney, and I guess I can tell him that if I can get the damn time machine to work on schedule.

Rating:
Summary: Reading that is a reasonably pleasant diversion.
Review: I see that, before writing this review, the average rating for this book is 3.5 stars. That's about what I'd give it.
None of the three short novels contained in this book is a great story, but all three are entertaining enough. Good rainy-afternoon type reading.
"The Night People" was my favorite; I think it can best be described as a story about things a lot of people fantasize about doing, but would not do in reality. The characters in this story do those things, giving the reader the chance to experience them vicariously.
"Woodrow Wilson Dime" resembles -- as other reviewers have noted -- a Twilight Zone-type alternate universe idea, fleshed out into a longer story.
"Marion's Wall" was probably my least favorite of the three stories, but would be of particular interest to film buffs.
All in all, a reasonably enjoyable collection.

Rating:
Summary: A sweet, funny fantasy.
Review: I've only read the first of the three stories -- THE WOODROW WILSON DIME -- but I loved it. Certainly if you liked TIME AND AGAIN, you'll love this. A loser discovers an alternate reality where all his dreams have come true. Like an old TWILIGHT ZONE episode, it takes one fantasy element and runs with it. Very funny; very sweet. A real bit of wish fulfillment.

Rating:
Summary: inconsistent quality
Review: I've read several other Jack Finney novels. I think he has a wonderful imagination and terrific style, and I particularly like his dialogue -- witty and natural-sounding.

I thought these three stories were of mixed quality: The Woodrow Wilson Dime and Marion's Wall were excellent. The Woodrow Wilson dime is particularly good, examining the many outcomes possible from simple actions. But I thought Finney was slightly less successful with The Night People. His characters were likeable, but ultimately their actions were not believable.

That said, though, I would re-emphasize that Finney is a fine writer, and even the weakest novel here is better than many other novelists' work. And the two stronger novels are highly entertaining. And what a bargain -- three Finney works in one volume!

Rating:
Summary: inconsistent quality
Review: I've read several other Jack Finney novels. I think he has a wonderful imagination and terrific style, and I particularly like his dialogue -- witty and natural-sounding.

I thought these three stories were of mixed quality: The Woodrow Wilson Dime and Marion's Wall were excellent. The Woodrow Wilson dime is particularly good, examining the many outcomes possible from simple actions. But I thought Finney was slightly less successful with The Night People. His characters were likeable, but ultimately their actions were not believable.

That said, though, I would re-emphasize that Finney is a fine writer, and even the weakest novel here is better than many other novelists' work. And the two stronger novels are highly entertaining. And what a bargain -- three Finney works in one volume!

Rating:
Summary: Don't Miss A Finney Book!
Review: Jack Finney is probably best known for his story "The Body Snatchers" which was made into a movie and for his time travel adventure "Time And Again" which acquired a cult following. But, as we can see in "Three By Finney" it is his unique imagination that gives all of his stories a glow and a charm all their own. Proof of his gift is that his books have become movies. One of the three stories in this book, "Marion's Wall" was made into a movie called "Roxie" that starred actress Glenn Close in the title role. Roxie ("Marion" in the book) is a flapper whose movie career (in the early days of Hollywood) was aborted by a car accident. Roxie returns as a ghost to take up where she left off and causes all kinds of fun and confusion. A second story is about time-travel again; "The Woodrow Wilson Dime" is a tale of a man venturing back and forth in time and you'll love the varying versions of his life that are caused by his travels in time. The last of the three stories is a fanciful account of the adventures of two married couples who take to the streets of San Francisco at night to do all kinds of mischief. This story is so bizarre, funny, and wild that only Finney could have thought of it. Amazon lists a number of books by Jack Finney and every one of them is a good read; naturally some are better than others. When you are a person who reads a lot, as I am, and you find an author as gifted and interesting as Finney, you get the feeling a prospector must have when he discovers a big pocket of gold. Some authors - like the two people who wrote (separately) "To Kill A Mockingbird" and "The Sand Pebbles" - only wrote one book. While you love those books, you are forever disappointed that the authors never wrote more. But an author like Finney, who left us with a number of well-written, imaginative stories, is a mother-lode for those new readers who have not yet discovered him.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Miss A Finney Book!
Review: Jack Finney is probably best known for his story "The Body Snatchers" which was made into a movie and for his time travel adventure "Time And Again" which acquired a cult following. But, as we can see in "Three By Finney" it is his unique imagination that gives all of his stories a glow and a charm all their own. Proof of his gift is that his books have become movies. One of the three stories in this book, "Marion's Wall" was made into a movie called "Roxie" that starred actress Glenn Close in the title role. Roxie ("Marion" in the book) is a flapper whose movie career (in the early days of Hollywood) was aborted by a car accident. Roxie returns as a ghost to take up where she left off and causes all kinds of fun and confusion. A second story is about time-travel again; "The Woodrow Wilson Dime" is a tale of a man venturing back and forth in time and you'll love the varying versions of his life that are caused by his travels in time. The last of the three stories is a fanciful account of the adventures of two married couples who take to the streets of San Francisco at night to do all kinds of mischief. This story is so bizarre, funny, and wild that only Finney could have thought of it. Amazon lists a number of books by Jack Finney and every one of them is a good read; naturally some are better than others. When you are a person who reads a lot, as I am, and you find an author as gifted and interesting as Finney, you get the feeling a prospector must have when he discovers a big pocket of gold. Some authors - like the two people who wrote (separately) "To Kill A Mockingbird" and "The Sand Pebbles" - only wrote one book. While you love those books, you are forever disappointed that the authors never wrote more. But an author like Finney, who left us with a number of well-written, imaginative stories, is a mother-lode for those new readers who have not yet discovered him.

Rating:
Summary: Marion's Wall: one of the three novels in this collection
Review: The skeleton of the story told by Jack Finney in his 1973 novel Marion's Wall is interesting enough. Married couple Nick and Jan--and their basset hound Al--move in to the second floor of a San Francisco house where, they discover, a silent screen actress by the name of Marion Marsh had once lived. (They find her name painted on the living room wall; hence the book's title.) Marion, a brash blonde with a penchant for risk-taking, had died in a car accident just before she would have made it big: Joan Crawford, in her first role, assumed the part Marion had been cast for and won the accolades that were due her predecessor. Cheated of this glowing future, Marion's ghost, as it turns out, wants to pursue her career in 1970's Hollywood, and she inhabits Jan's body, eventually with the latter's permission, with a view to making her come-back. But what will become of Jan, now that she's sharing her body with a wanton starlet? And how frequently will Nick cheat on his wife with his wife's body? The reader's curiosity about these and other questions may be sufficient to propel him or her to the book's finish line. But getting there is a long slog.

Jack Finney, the author of, among other books, the science fiction classics Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Time and Again, is quite capable of writing compelling fiction. And Marion's Wall would have made a good short story. Unfortunately, the book is a short story's worth of material stretched out to fill a novel's worth of pages. The story has not been expanded, as might have been done, through the introduction of subplots and minor characters who make things more difficult for our protagonists. Rather, it was expanded through the accumulation of wholly unnecessary, mind-numbingly uninteresting description. Particularly in the last thirty or so pages of the book, the details come so thick and fast that one reads on just to see how many more inconsequential items the author can paint with such precision. A small example of this comes some twenty pages from the end, when Nick and Jan/Marion are let into a gate by an employee of the mansion they're calling at--a man whose only function in the story is to open that gate and who is never heard from again: "We heard a sound, a rattle, and a man on a bicycle was riding bumpily down the driveway toward us: youngish, bald, and wearing a kind of butler's uniform, though without a coat--black pants with a narrow white stripe down the sides, black and white horizontally striped vest, wing collar, bow tie." Now imagine that virtually every object our heroes come across is described as precisely.

If you want to know whether Jan ever gets her body back, or what it's like to bed the ghost of a 1920s starlet, then Marion's Wall is the book for you. But if you want to appreciate Jack Finney's writing and imagination, stick to the classics.