Lately, to unwind in the evenings, I've been re-reading a comic novel by Jack Finney. Finney is best known for The Body Snatchers and Time and Again; this is a fluffy fantasy called The Woodrow Wilson Dime, originally published in 1968. Benjamin Bennell, a twenty-something office drone, finds a portal to an alternate world. History has taken slightly different turns in this new world, and he's more successful in any number of ways. (He's also married to a different woman, which is the main point of the novel and of the short story on which it is based.)
Here's the thing: I'm reading the novel in an omnibus collection from 1987, and it's different from the 1968 version. How appropriate, right? Not really. When you read a contemporary novel from the 1960s, you immerse yourself in the language and cultural assumptions and society of the time. Apparently believing that this is a bad thing, someone has gone through the original novel and updated a few of the lines to 1987 standards.
For example, instead of admiring "a dark-green eight-thousand-dollar sports car", Ben admires a "a dark-green forty-two-thousand-dollar sports car". Instead of meeting Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn working in a drugstore (as a pharmacist and a clerk--he asks Tracy, "Have you ever considered acting in the movies?"), Ben meets Paul Newman and Glenn Close. Ben reflects on the relationship between two women and thinks that it's like Linda Evans looking at Cindi Lauper.
But it's still the 1960s in every other way! At one point in the story Ben is spending $13.75 per week on rent at the YMCA. He rides what he calls an "automatic" elevator to his office at work, as if it's just as common to find human beings operating other elevators. He wears a suit to work every day and changes into wash slacks in the evenings; his wife wears stockings and a slip. Ben sometimes tucks a rolled-up message into a finger of his wife's glove. And a newspaper costs a dime. (That's the point of the title of the book, which I imagine they didn't want to change.)
Don't do it.
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Chicken Mãâàn
Tinkerertink69
Alan Milner
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Comments
Peace in our time
Stop the advance of the 451s
Hi, Elijah Rising--that's a good point. :-) Finney might have used Wilson because his eyeglasses would be unusual for a portrait on a coin, but who's going to know that today? I don't know.
^R^
They didn't even pick particularly iconic eighties personalities.
Fun observations.
Verbal, it's an odd thing: I last read this book maybe 20 years ago. Today, I'm seeing connections to Fringe, Mad Men, all sorts of things that have come up in the past few years. The icons change pretty quickly.