Now it's Time to Say Goodbye - Softcover

Peck, Dale

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0688168418 ISBN 13: 9780688168414

Publisher: William Morrow, 1999

Synopsis

With his third novel, published to overwhelming critical acclaim, Dale Peck delivers a gothic horror story of epic proportions.In the flatlands of Kansas, a small town called Kenosha burned to the ground; in its stead two new towns were created on nearby land -- the all-white Galatea and the black Galatia. To this divided community come two disillusioned New Yorkers, Colin and his young lover Justin Time. Their arrival triggers a brutal string of events, all linked to secrets of long ago, including the uncertain circumstances surrounding the lynching of an albino black boy. With the sexual assault and kidnapping of a town cheerleader, Colin and Justin find themselves both victims and suspects, protagonists and scapegoats. And as they discover the inner demons of a town reborn from the ashes, they must ultimately embrace their own dark truths.

Provocative, ambitious, satisfyingly complex -- in every sense, a major achievement from one of our most accomplished writers, a novelist of the first order.

About this title

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 claimed the lives of 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, Fucking Martin 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 William Faulkner and Edgar Allan Poe.

Review

Praise for Now It's Time to Say Goodbye

"This dark, ferocious book reads like Twin Peaks and Pulp Fiction combined with Days of Heaven and To Kill a Mockingbird, with some bits of Faulkner, Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor thrown in for good measure. [Peck] has given us a big, galvanic novel, a novel that stands as the capstone, thus far, of his impressive career."
--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Peck is not only one of the leading literary voices of his generation, but also one of the few avant-garde writers of any age who is changing the rules for prose fiction. His novels simultaneously define and defy the genre."
--Los Angeles Times

"Fiercely compelling . . . There is no place that Dale Peck is afraid to go, but what he takes for granted about human nature is just as astonishing. He does show us all of ourselves, even if we don't want to believe."
--The Boston Globe

"Now It's Time to Say Goodbye is [a] wonder. It's an enormous book, brilliant without being gratuitously difficult, comic, horrific, sly, a stretch that [Peck] pulls off with ease. If you didn't know it already, you'll by the time you're done: Dale Peck can do whatever he wants to."
--BOMB Magazine

"With Now It's Time to Say Goodbye, Peck has written his most complex, subtle--while appearing the most literal--and chilling tale to date. And it is monumental, one of the most disturbing and morally powerful novels of the decade. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde described the truth as 'rarely pure and never simple'--and the same can be said of the people in Now It's Time to Say Goodbye and the stories Dale Peck has to tell."
--The Village Voice

"The most technically accomplished work to emerge from a gay publishing boom gone bust in the late '90s. Peck's third novel promises to break him out of the gay literary ghetto. Goodbye is an endlessly allusive and elusive thriller . . . There simply aren't enough superlatives to describe this great American novel: erudite and lyrical, Peck's latest is one of the best books of an outstanding literary year."
--Out

"A world that hints of David Lynch's Blue Velvet the strangeness is upsetting, off-putting, unbelievable, and--through the inescapable power of Peck's unyielding style--completely riveting."
--Philadelphia Inquirer

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0688168418
• ISBN 13: 9780688168414
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 458