In the Meantime [Paperback]

Robin Lippincott (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2008

From the intimacy of small town America to big city life, from WWII to 9/11, In the Meantime vividly encapsulates an unforgettable era.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The third novel from Lippincott (Mr. Dalloway) offers a curious, bittersweet study of the more or less unremarkable lives of three fast friends. Kathryn, Luke and Starling meet as children in their anonymous Midwestern small town on a 1931 summer's day, and soon become closer than siblings. The three eventually fulfill a childhood dream, concocted by Kathryn, to move to Manhattan, where they share an apartment. There, Kathryn attends college; Luke works his way up from the mail room at a major publishing house; and Star pursues acting, only to find that being biracial keeps him from getting major roles. Lippincott uses a very Virginia Woolf–like free and direct style to hone in on his main characters, and to triangulate them. He takes the three through high school (including some clunky sexual encounters), then shifts to clipped year-by-year recountings of the 1950s. The latter chapters reveal their struggles to fit into the arts culture. Most successful is the concluding section, set on September 7, 2001, in which Kathryn poignantly reflects on her life. The book's pleasures outweigh the many moments of overreaching. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"...a poignant, intimate, and highly nuanced novell...Although it has a gay-oriented subplot, it is highly accessible to readers of all sexual persuasions, focusing on the complexities of friendship rather than those of sex." -- Library Journal

"...marvelously conveys the wonder and excitement of those heady New York days." -- Courier Journal

"Lippincott has a particular knack for the shorthand dialogue that develops between people who have been together for a long time, and he portrays the complicated bonds between friends and lovers without sentimentalizing them...delivers many...tenderly molded flashes of truth." - -- The New York Times

"The love that dare not speak its name both connects and divides two friends in a group of three...nicely phrased" -- Kirkus --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: The Toby Press (September 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592642535
• ISBN-13: 978-1592642533
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,002,600 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born and raised in the south, Robin Lippincott is the author of the novels In the Meantime (2007), Our Arcadia: An American Watercolor (2001), and Mr. Dalloway (1999), as well as a short story collection, The Real, True Angel (1996). His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Paris Review, Fence, American Short Fiction, Memorious, The New York Times Book Review, The Literary Review, Provincetown Arts, The Louisville Review, The Bloomsbury Review, and many other journals, and also in the anthologies M2M: New Literary Fiction, Rebel Yell and Rebel Yell 2.

Lippincott's fiction has been nominated for the IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award, the Independent Book Award, the Pushcart Prize, the American Library Association Roundtable Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. He is a multiple Yaddo fellow as well as a fellow of the MacDowell Colony. He teaches in the brief-residency MFA Writing Program at Spalding University, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "All the world's a stage..., August 18, 2007

By 

Amanda Richards (Georgetown, Guyana) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In the Meantime (Hardcover)

..And all the men and women merely players" .... William Shakespeare, As You Like It.

This slim tome recounts the lives of three friends, from the time of their earliest memories to the fall of the dominoes, and although it doesn't have anything for the action/adventure crowd, the author takes the reader meticulously through the years when Kathryn, Luke and Starling ruled the world.

It all started in the early 1930s when a boy with a wagon picked up a girl with a pigtail, and the two happened upon the prettiest boy in the world, who was at that precise moment, wearing a mud pie. From this chance meeting, a firm friendship developed that survived not only their dissimilar backgrounds and lifestyle differences, but racism, intolerance and a not quite rhapsodic Bohemian existence in Manhattan.

From threesome to twosome, and back again, life goes on for the friends, during which they observe the early, mesmerizing performances of Billie Holiday in her prime and witness the sad days of her drug assisted decline. Eventually, as it must, their paths begin to separate, and soon there is only one, but the point of this book is not so much the beginning, or even the end, but the journey in between.

Lippincott's characters pulse with suppressed desires, ambitions and dreams unfulfilled, and although I can't classify it as a page turner, there's a lot of drama to be found between the covers.


Amanda Richards, August 19, 2007

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Mystery of Time, Transcended by Art, June 12, 2008

By 

Mary Lee C. Fowler (Pownal, Maine) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In the Meantime (Hardcover)

This is an extraordinary novel, a demonstration of time's inevitable shaping of human lives, from the ascent of youthful hopes and dreams, to middle-age's reluctant descent into the shards of thwarted ambition, on into the long flat plain of old age and its final reward of acceptance (if we're lucky): intense but calm happiness at simply being. So Kathryn, the only one of the original three lifetime friends remaining after eighty years, is able to just let unproductive thoughts go, and sit gloriously in sun slanting through windows, knowing that the dust will come, but in the meantime, she's lucky to be alive.
And although the author so deftly and authoritatively shows time's mean grip on us, he does it in a mere 170 pages, suggesting that art is the only way we can step out of the stream, distance ourselves enough to render time and assess its effects. He does the same with space, flashing to Tokyo and Amsterdam to give us indelible glimpses of less fortunate threesomes crushed by war. And the amazing thing is that this transcendence of time and space work in this slim volume, giving us a language to ponder them long after we put the book down.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful combination of story and storyteller, October 15, 2007

By 

Armchair Interviews (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In the Meantime (Hardcover)

Robin Lippincott's third novel, In the Meantime, has a lot more to do with style, structure, and character development than it does with plot. The plot is rather simple, really. In 1931, two friends, ages five and six, stumble upon the prettiest boy they have ever met. He is playing in the mud and is wearing a mud crown. The three become inseparable for the remaining lifetimes, with the novel ending on September 7, 2001. I can see where Lippincott chose to give the last chapter its pre-9/11 date. There is something innocent about all the days before that one that defines lifetimes.

What makes this novel different than the average coming-of-age or the BFF (best friends for ever) novel is the style. The long and never-boring sentences are reminiscent of the great Faulkner himself--only with punctuation. The back cover blurb is approximately 200 words, yet there isn't a word that can be deleted because each word provides important information for the reader to learn about the three main characters, Kathryn, Luke, and Starling. Some sentences run for almost two pages, but they are easy to follow.

In regards to structure, in the first section, we see the children meeting. In the second section is near the end of Kathryn's life, after Luke has passed and Starling has disappeared. What happens between those two sections is In the Meantime, where the three plot to go New York and live together, where Kathryn takes a husband and a lover, where Luke becomes a successful editor and tries to deny his homosexuality, where Sterling dreams of becoming a famous actor, only to have both his dreams and his lust for Luke dashed.

Character development is crucial in a novel like this, especially one that is a mere 178 pages long. You get to intimately know Kathryn, Luke, and Starling, yet there is not one spoken word of dialogue. Amazingly, none of the characters actually speak, yet each has his/her distinctive voice and speech pattern.

One chapter doesn't seem to fit. It takes place on August 6, 1945 when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. We see the effects of that day and event on three friends who seem to mirror Kathryn, Luke, and Starling in a different culture. But it is jarring, and I see no need for it to be there, unless it is to make a statement that friendships like theirs are not unique and happen everywhere.

Armchair Interviews says: If you want to read a book where every word was measured for its value to the sentence and the story, this is it.