TIME IN ITS FLIGHT

by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 9, 1978

Brick-thick, this chronicle of a Vermont family shows Schaeffer's artistry off to great effect while at the same time often dulling us with its sheer plenitude. In the 1850s, Edna Dickinson, a rebellious and intelligent Boston girl of well-off parents, is sent for some straightening out to her mother's old friend Ten in Vermont, where she promptly falls in love with Ten's younger brother, John Steele, a widowered country doctor. Five children issue from the union, three girls and two boys, each subtly and strongly individualized by Schaeffer's large powers of characterization. Both sons follow their father's path into medicine, and the grit and colors of the lives of 19th-century doctors' families shake from the book like an iridescent powder: typhoid, diphtheria, influenza epidemics are lived through and around with emotional and practical strategies such as we no longer observe. Schaeffer makes us share the detailed way-it-was. But her very verisimilitude can become oppressive. Period books, recipes, novels, daguerreotype poses--this novel is an archive of them; people spend a disproportionate amount of time and pages reading or perusing books and objects--with us looking over their shoulders. So much hoarding of authentic material gives the book a museumish torpor, with little of the dramatic feel and contrast of Woiwode's similarly ambitious Beyond the Bedroom Wall. What Schaeffer does reap all on her own, though, is a remarkable tone, a theme that the title encapsulates. Edna and John in particular share a philosophical fascination with time and change and death that seems completely natural, not authorial overlay. ""A space where something was once and now was not; yes, he thought, you needed something that large. If only when someone died, a torn space appeared in the blue sky with nothing but emptiness visible behind it, perhaps that would make it more real."" Schaeffer's generous book seems to try to block out the edges of just that torn space and fill it with the observed past.

Pub Date: June 9, 1978

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1978

Categories: FICTION