Amazon.com 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 killed 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, Martin and John 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 Faulkner and Poe.
Galatia/Galatea, a small Kansas town, divided by different spellings, different races, and vastly different perspectives on life, is the scene of rape, murder, and general mayhem as its residents struggle in a microcosm with all the ills of the outside world within its fairly isolated borders. Outsiders, a gay white couple from New York, seek refuge in the town from the stalking death of AIDS, only to become engulfed in the backwash of a long-ago wrong--the lynching of an albino black man, falsely accused of raping a young white girl. The newcomers, writer Colin Nieman and his lover Justin Time, magnify the harsh contrasts of the town---artistic sensibilities versus the mundane, gays and straights, men and women, whites and blacks, the powerful and the powerless. The pair brings with them a conceit that their complicated lives of wealth, betrayal, and cruelty are beyond the comprehension of the rural town, only to discover lives far more complex and violent than their own. The town's resident artist Wade Painting and his black lover Divine serve as counterpoints to Colin and Justin, setting off a quadrangle of artistic and sexual jealousy. Have the outsiders somehow upset the delicate balance of the town and triggered unspeakable violence, or has the town's own past come back to haunt it? The broader conflict is between white powers-that-be, struggling to keep dark secrets hidden and progress moving ahead in a dying town, and the black bastion of power, quietly exacting revenge and keeping the outside world and its threats of racial tension at bay. Peck's novel is a compelling thriller with subtle and informed knowledge of race relations in the U.S.
Vanessa Bush
