Time and Again
Our last Salle's book club pick was Time and Again by Jack Finney. We picked it because in the afterword of 11/22/63, Stephen King called it a great time-travel novel—even saying he wanted to dedicate his own book to Finney. With that kind of endorsement, expectations were high.
But honestly, I came away a little disappointed. The time-travel concept (with hypnosis) is charming, but its logic is murky. The “past” seems to flow alongside the “present,” raising questions that the book never quite bothers to answer. The story skips the usual time-paradox tension—which, to me, feels like skipping the best part of the genre.
However, I loved the atmosphere. Finney builds settings in a way that still feels fresh today—his 1880s Manhattan is vivid enough to smell the horse-drawn carriages and hear the gas lamps hiss. The details—early photography, people navigating a world before electricity—feel strangely alive. Considering it was written in the early 1970s, the historical realism is impressive. The old (authentic?) photos and illustrations scattered through the novel make it feel like a time capsule you can hold.
Maybe that’s what this book is really about—not time travel, but nostalgia. The longing for a slower, quieter world that probably never existed as we can only imagine it. After Back to the Future, we might have obsessed with paradoxes and scientific precision (I learned the word verisimilitudity) in a time travel-story. But Time and Again reminds us that sometimes people just want to go back.
Si Morley steps into the 1880s chasing love and wonder. But if he knew what the 1990s and 2000s would become—a world connected, creative, and (mostly) optimistic—I think he would’ve stayed in his own 1970s. It was the Cold War era, yes, but we know that the future would be brighter.
Now, in the 2020s, I’m not sure we can say the same. We live in a strange new kind of the Neo Cold War era. Maybe that’s why Finney’s nostalgia still feels real today. I just hope the 2030s prove us wrong—that we’ll have a future bright enough to choose not going back.
