[Peck] revists the places and pasts of his earlier fiction...with an emotional vengence, dramatic bredth and observant fervency that brings his every gift to frution.. It chills. That if falls unltimately into a pattern beautiful, affecting and rational strongly proves Peck's mastery as a writer.
— LA Times Book Review

Peck seems to try to balance his post-modern style and approach with the genre of thriller. Doesn't work....For those who enjoy a good thriller, the novel falls flat for lack of fulfilling that genre's prime criteria: a believable plot and, most importantly, a satisfactory denouement. For those who can forego the need for clear, even semi-logical explanations in hopes of gaining some deeper insight into, say, the creative process or whatever else the novel might spew up, then there are myriads of elliptical avenues to explore...this one's a big, fat turkey.

Young American novelists strike many poses these days -- clever, savvy, confessional, shocking, pissed-off, self-aggrandizing, ironic (especially ironic) -- but what they rarely are is merely sincere. Dale Peck, however, is a young novelist whose first two novels struck many readers as remarkably sincere, as though he really believed he could win you over simply by stringing together one lovely sentence after another.

This is also true of Peck's third book, Now It's Time To Say Goodbye, despite the fact that its plot is both sensational and preposterous. Both of Peck's previous books pushed the envelope, but each did so through narrative experimentation more than over-the-top story lines. His first novel, Martin and John, was not so much about two characters as about two roles, to whom those names are applied in a variety of set pieces dealing with love and AIDS. John shows up again in Peck's second novel, The Law of Enclosures, which is mostly about a couple named Henry and Beatrice -- though their story is unceremoniously interrupted by a 50-page memoir from a character named Dale Peck.

This time out we get a sort of hyperpotboiler centered on Colin, a successful writer, and Justin, his ex-hustler lover. They say goodbye to New York City and the long roll call of friends lost to AIDS. They move to a small, racially divided Kansas town beset by its own plague of secrets and almost immediately get caught up in the tornado of crimes and misbehavior whose eye is the lynching of an albino black boy. There's enough violence and sex here for three or four novels. There are several savage beatings. A man gets shot; a dog gets shot. There's a fire and a hanging and someone is run off the road. At one point someone else is apparently ripped apart by pigs. Then the pigs get shot. Meanwhile, everyone gets laid. In the telling, Peck switches among more than a half-dozen narrators, black and white, intelligent and dim, young and old, straight and gay, male and female. A bit much? Sometimes, yes. But for the most part, the book works surprisingly well, partly because Peck is able to pile up some fantastic sentences. So even as it becomes clear that the town's vast and terrible secrets are neither plausible nor particularly illuminating on matters of race or sex, it's still hard not to get caught up in the onion peeling.

Inevitably, though, the book's conclusion doesn't match its unwieldy buildup. Peck goes overboard with loaded names, including a mysterious woman who calls herself Rosetta Stone. Add that to the invocation of the names Martin, John, Henry and Bea, and it finally feels like some sort of code, which I'd just as soon leave to grad students. Storywise, that's a distraction. But Peck's aim isn't so much to draw you into this tornado as to blow you away with his words, and it's impressive how often he actually does this. I suppose you could make a case that what I'm calling Peck's sincerity is as much a pose as anything else. But I prefer to think of it as a stance, which is something braver, and something different altogether. -- Salon

...has defied the boundaries of autobiography and novel... Few writers have Dale Peck's nerve. -- The Nation

Though it's not a fully successful novel, this fascinating melodrama of sexual and racial confusion, conflict, and injustice is both a bold departure from and a logical outgrowth of the brooding studies of gay angst (Martin and John, 1993; The Law of Enclosures, 1996) that established Peck as one of our most interesting younger writers. Thematic and other echoes of the earlier books resound throughout this big novel, which relates through a large chorus of townspeople's voices the explosive occurrences after writer Colin Nieman and his lover "Justin Time" flee AIDS-polluted New York for a rural Kansas town that's effectively divided into white and black subsections, Galatea and Galatia. The pair's interrelations with numerous bruised and guilty souls—a black hustler named Divine, a woman "archivist" obsessed with unearthing her town's secrets, and a wealthy matriarch who may have ordered a murder are prominent among them—reveal a dauntingly intricate heritage of violence: the lynching of a black teenager falsely accused of "touching" a young girl, the real crime that underlay the town's mania for "justice." The ambiguities in both of the novels Colin has written (and will write) and of the very one we're reading are—a bit affectedly—linked to that mystery. More persuasively, the infectious momentum here powerfully dramatizes what its characters call "humanity's need to reveal itself through written confession" and the truth that "most people have only one secret, and that secret is whom they truly love." Peck incorporates his story's grand mal particulars into a surprisingly tightly plotted narrative, weakened but not quite sunk by its penchant forexcess (the resolution of that lynching victim's story is both overwrought and opaque). And to its benefit and detriment (in almost equal measure), this very literary fiction is derivative, to varying degrees, of James Purdy, James Leo Herlihy, Erskine Caldwell, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. A rich, readable, frustrating mulligan stew of a novel. Peck has upped the ante impressively. After Kansas, one wonders where he'll take us next.

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

04/01/2015
Two New Yorkers flee the AIDS epidemic to a small Kansas town where they are thrown into the place's dark and complicated past in this 1998 novel.