Now It's Time to Say Goodbye - Softcover

Peck, Dale

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1616955643 ISBN 13: 9781616955649

Publisher: Soho Press, 2015

Synopsis

When the 500th person they know dies of AIDS, Colin and Justin flee New York City. They end up in Galatia, a Kansas town founded by freed slaves in the wake of the Civil War whose population is now divided, evenly but uneasily, between African Americans descended from the town’s founders and Caucasians who buy up more of the town’s land with each passing year. But within weeks of relocating, they are implicated in a harrowing crime, and discover that they can’t outrun their own tortured history, nor that of their new home. An encompassing, visionary, many-threaded work, Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye is an American novel of great scope and nearly mythological intensity.

This is the third volume of Gospel Harmonies, a series of seven stand-alone books (four have been written) that follow the character of John in various guises as he attempts to navigate the uneasy relationship between the self and the postmodern world.

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Review

The setting for Dale Peck's third novel is not one but two small, dying towns: Galatea, settled by the white citizens of Kenosha after a firestorm of biblical proportions destroyed their town, and Galatia, founded by black pioneers more than 100 years before. Galatea may have effectively erased the older town in the eyes of the world, but it did not remove it, and Galatia lives on as a kind of shadowy palimpsest. To this dusty corner of the prairie come two outsiders, Justin Time and his lover Colin Nieman. Fleeing from New York, where AIDS has killed the magic number of 500 of their friends, the two settle in Galatea for reasons that are not immediately apparent--though one Galatean lists five possible ones: "A-I-D-S were the first four and the fifth was: it ain't round here." Colin is a successful novelist with several books to his credit and enough money to buy the county's grandest house; Justin has nothing, not even his own name--that "bad joke," says Colin, "that refused to go away."

Soon the pair are drawn into the legacy of Galatea's hate-filled racial past. Years ago, a black albino boy named Eric Johnson was lynched for supposedly molesting a little white girl; later, the same little girl, grown up into Galatea's homecoming queen, is raped, mutilated, and abducted while Justin looks on. Now It's Time To Say Goodbye is very different from the narrative experimentation of Peck's first two novels, Martin and John and The Law of Enclosures. Still, certain names--Susan, Martin, John, Bea--and vague corresponding character similarities recur in all three, to disorienting effect. Also like its predecessors, this is a deeply unconventional and disturbing book. Incest; murder; a love quadrangle that's driven by equal parts lust and art; characters with names like Webby Greeving, T.V. Daniels, Rosetta Stone, the artist Wade Painter and his paramour Divine--this is one thriller that reads like the postmodern literary love child of Faulkner and Poe.

About the Author

Dale Peck is the author of twelve books in a variety of genres, including Martin and John, Hatchet Jobs, and Sprout. His fiction and criticism have earned him two O. Henry Awards, a Pushcart Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. He lives in New York City, where he teaches in the New School’s Graduate Writing Program.

About this edition

• Publisher: Soho Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1616955643
• ISBN 13: 9781616955649
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464