Out of Time

The life of Kenneth Gordon Gold, a young man killed in a fatal car accident, is captured through the indelible memories, grief, and hopes of his parents, siblings, friends, lovers, and a witness to the accident

This first novel by the author of the short story collection Not a Free Show is an intimate, wrenching portrait of individuals shattered by an untimely death. The narrative opens--and closes--with the fatal car crash of 20-year-old Ken Gold. Schulman lifts her story out of time, going backward to show the family a year before Ken's death, ruptured by the parents' divorce; further back to his childhood; and further still to his parents' courtship. She moves forward to a year, then five years, after his death, to a decade later. Schulman bends not only time but perspective, giving the points of view of many characters--relatives, friends, bystanders. Ken's mother copes with the horror of outliving her child, abandoning her work as a guidance counselor because "the uncertainty of young people's futures makes her crazy; all she can imagine are tragic endings." Grief incapacitates Ken's sister, who's "determined to do nothing with her life." Ken's brothers, less able to articulate their loss, feel it just as deeply. In luminous prose that is comic as well as lyric, Schulman measures the love, anger and pain that charge our deepest relationships.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A story collection, lamely masquerading as a novel, that revolves around (and around) the death of Kenneth Gordon Gold, aged 20, who drove his car down an empty road straight into a tree. Speaking now in the first person, now in the third, now when they are young, now older, now before the accident occurred, now 30 years after it took place, Ken's relatives, friends, lovers, and some who never knew him throw light on the accident but no illumination. Angles abound; vision is wanting. Ken's surviving family--Hannah, the mother who moans but never genuinely mourns; Jack, the father who skips out; Doug, the eldest brother who finally and endlessly cries, but without convincing grief; Cara, the neurotic sister; Jeremy, the homosexual younger brother--all subscribe to the same dismal theory (perhaps because they are all the same dismal person) that good fortune lies in having no family. Jack refers to his second wife's child as: ``...Mags, that fortunate only child.'' Jeremy wishes his father had been hit by a bus before he married his mother, then none of them would have been born. Although Schulman (Not a Free Show, 1988) occasionally comes up with a nice image, her men, women, children, straights and gays all sound alike, and her dialogue is uniformly banal. ``Between the two of us there have been enough tears around here to last a lifetime,'' says Jim in ``Boy Girl, Boy Girl.'' Says Sylvia in ``This is The Life:'' ``If Ken hadn't died I bet my whole life would have been different.'' A disappointing second effort. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Twenty-year-old Kenneth Gold has died after slamming his car into a tree. His loss constitutes the central event casually or agonizingly remembered by near strangers, close friends, and family. The chapters, written from these varied points of view, set in times before and after Ken's death, relate self-contained short stories connected by this single thread rather than an unbroken narrative. Ken is the golden boy, the linchpin of a shattered family whose absence creates a vortex which threatens to engulf the lives of those closest to him. In its exploration of untimely death, resentment of the living, and guilt of survival this first novel is thematically similar to Judith Guests's Ordinary People ( LJ 5/1/76) but provides a wider if not deeper range. One finishes this book wanting to know more about nearly every character--a credit to the author's skill. Recommended for most fiction collections.
- Sheila Riley, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.