TIME OUT OF MIND

by John Maxim ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 24, 1985

Like Maxim's earlier astral novels, this opens with an airy likable premise; then the plot materializes and the airiness gets plastered over with melodrama. Herein a man is victimized by a fear of falling snow which awakens past-life memories and casts him into the physical Connecticut and New York City of earlier eras. The backgrounds turn out to be more attractive than the characters. Jonathan Corbin, a network programmer in Chicago, is offered a sport-programming slot in the New York office. He transfers to the city, moves in with a companion network exec, his sometime beloved Gwen Leamas, a ""slender honey-haired Englishwoman"" whose love he resists, while looking for an apartment of his own. Though he's never seen it before, he knows every room in a rundown little cottage in Connecticut which binds him with its magic aura, and restoring it brings back obsessive memories of earlier lives. When snow falls, he is invaded utterly by the past and in Manhattan finds himself in the man-dominated Gilded Age of Jay Gould as he murders a woman (by freezing her in a snowbank) on a gaslighted midtown street during a blizzard. Bizarre? Bizarre! In those earlier days, Corbin was named Tilden Beckwith and was himself murdered, along with other male members of his line. Tilden had been married to Charlotte Corbin, who wanted the Beckwith inheritance. Meanwhile, Tilden had been paying blackmail over a bastard child. Why has present-day Corbin been resisting the ministrations of Gwen? Because they were once married, when she was named Margaret--and Tilden Beckwith murdered his wife. Will Corbin murder Gwen-Margaret, whom his Tilden-memory tells him is a slut and whore? What will Jonathan's doctor-uncle Harry Sturdevant, who has an elephant's memory for New York's social history, uncover in the Corbin-Tilden family records that bears on these slowly unfolding, malign genetic memories? Despite excessive detail and tiresome plotting, Maxim has a happy time wallpapering the past, which readers will enjoy. Would that the details emerge from Jonathan, though, rather than be built into a huge set for him to inhabit. Movingly illustrated with old photos.

Pub Date: Jan. 24, 1985

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1985

Categories: FICTION