LADY'S TIME

by Alan V. Hewat ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 28, 1985

Hewat's first novel assiduously recreates the golden and eccentric age of ragtime music in the persona of Lady Winslow, a saintly half-breed pianist who got her start as a ""tickler"" playing in the brothels of New Orleans and then came north to play at an exclusive turn-of-the-century Vermont resort. The book opens with Lady (and the help of voodoo roots and innate spiritual spotlessness) bringing her son Leon back to life after a drowning accident. . .so right away you know how exemplary she'll be from then on. Her past is dark, though: her mother murdered by her father, the same psychopath who will stalk Lady throughout her life. But Lady finds shelter first with her teacher, Brick, a blues-and-rags pioneer; then with the Peterson family, millionaire owners of The Sequantas House in New England, where Lady will live out her life (until her death by misadventure) and expand her art. Hewat writes sensitively and knowledgeably, but there's a lot of over-upholstering and repetitiveness: ragtime is once described as having a ""scintillating glow like the reflection of the summer sun setting across the slow-moving, dirt-brown river""; then again and similarly as ""Little figurations that sparkled and danced like the reflections strewn across the crinkling surface of the lake by the sun perched on the mountains above the western shore."" Folksy, dialect-narrators don't much help either (""By the time he came here his first wife had already been sent packing. Didn't breed fast enough to suit him""). The novel's weakest point, though, may be its very ambition, the form itself. It's a flaw that shows up in other writers too--in Francine Prose, John Irving, Anne Rice, Mark Helprin--who all try to work around the bone of a luminous historical moment only to find they have no space to truly step back and put some meat around its central nostalgic integrity. They write a lot, but with a scarcity of individual psychology to the characters, of emotional complication. The prose seems to how, r over ragtime here, but never bite into it. The result is virtuous but curiously (under the circumstances) unrhythmic work.

Pub Date: Aug. 28, 1985

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1985

Categories: FICTION