The Barnes & Noble Review
Not many authors try their hand at the gothic literary novel, and few have succeeded as well as Dale Peck does in Now It's Time to Say Goodbye . This ambitious, experimental novel features a pair of unlikely lovers looking for refuge from their AIDS-stricken urban community who stumble upon a small town with its own unique horrors. Part mythos and part queerstory, Now It's Time to Say Goodbye was one of the most distinctive literary novels of 1998, and now it's out in an affordable trade paperback edition.
The gothic literary novel is something many greater and lesser writers have tried their hand at, each with some remarkable degree of success although even in failure, a gothic story has its own way of succeeding. The bottom line of gothic horror, it seems to me, is that the psychologies of its players must somehow bleed the truth beneath their skins without ever having to tell anything of hidden secrets directly to each other. In essence, we the readers are part of the psychology of the gothic horror novel, too, for we bring our own understandings and complexities to the story in trying to figure out how the mysterious pieces come together. Dale Peck is a young writer who has been quick to establish himself in the literary world with his recent novels Martin and John and The Law of Enclosures. With his new one, Now It's Time to Say Goodbye , he has entered the ranks of first-rate literary novelists making a foray into a very nearly surreal gothic landscape, as far from the New York literary world as, well...Kansas, the setting ofthisnovel.
And it's a gay novel, as well.
Colin Nieman and Justin Time, lovers in New York who have the most unequal relationship in recent literary memory, are fed up with the world. Colin has compiled a list of their friends who have died of AIDS in the past several years. He has sworn that when the list reaches 500, they will move as far away from the urban world of epidemics and dying youth as possible. First, they take trips around the world to find such places, but there seems to be no haven from the disease. Then they find it in a small town in Kansas, very close to the center of the United States. It's a town that is truly forked, for half of it is called Galatea, the other half Galatia. The former is the white side of town, a part of the area that has no real history of its own and is in many ways completely ignorant of its other half. Galatia, on the other hand, is the historic area, a community founded before the Civil War by free blacks who felt that Kansas might be a paradise for them and their descendants. But Colin and Justin have their own forks in the roads of their lives, their own secrets, their own abuses and hostilities toward each other and their pasts all of which begin to unravel as they enter this brave new world of the Midwest.
It is on the black side of town that Colin and Justin arrive, meeting an array of characters that at first seem laboriously funky; but as the novel progresses, they become very real and extremely fascinating people. If you noted Justin's slightly jokey and pretentious name (Justin Time), you'll find it is just one abuse of names in the world of this novel. The essence of what a name is and what it does for a person's identity comes into question through the story, in which things are named in order to both cover up a secret and distinguish between "us" and "them." Oddly, I found something in the book that reminded me very much of Joyce Carol Oates's work, even while I saw no real similarities of plot or style. This book reads very spiritually, and I found myself caring deeply about the outcome of an involving and mysterious story about people who at first seemed shallow and uninvolved in life. The horror of the story derives from murders and rapes that are like a continuum of the Galatea-Galatia divergence, and the identity of the stalking monster who committed them and seems to control the imagination of all who live within this small Kansas town's boundaries.
Dale Peck's voice is clear and gorgeous, and his characters are like labyrinths waiting to be explored. Highly recommended.
Douglas Clegg
The New York Times
Now It's Time to Say Goodbye is that rare thing: an utterly gripping thriller -- crammed full of suspense, Gothic horror and often startling violence -- and a highly sophisticated piece of literary legerdemain. 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.
Michiko Kakutani
This dark, ferocious book reads like Twin Peaks and Pulp Fiction combined with Days of Heavenv 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 nove, a novel that stands as the capstone, thus far, of his impressive career.
New York Times
Celia McGee
[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
Barcelona 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.
Rob Walker
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
John Brenkman
...has defied the boundaries of autobiography and novel... Few writers have Dale Peck's nerve. -- The Nation
Kirkus Reviews
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 soulsa 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 themreveal 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 area bit affectedlylinked 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.
From the Publisher
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
Library Journal
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.