The Rags of Time: A Novel [Hardcover]

Maureen Howard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 2009

The concluding volume in a quartet of highly acclaimed novels that include A Lover's Almanac, Big as Life, and The Silver Screen

Maureen Howard's new novel is the last in a beautifully written and boldly structured cycle of four books, woven as a tapestry of the seasons, that critics have praised as "brazenly intelligent," "daredevil clever," and "raptly adventurous."

The Rags of Time tells of an aging Manhattan writer with an ailing heart who lives near Central Park, who is reviewing and examining both her own history and the lives she has imagined in her fiction. Interlaced are private rambles and public facts: daily strolls through the park; the tough love between her and the two men in her life, her husband and her brother; three mythmaking figures from history (Columbus, Walter Raleigh, and Frederick Law Olmstead) who matter prominently to her and her work; and updates on the lives of her fictional characters (an improbable mathematician, his lapsed artist wife, a woman historian in mourning).

A moving meditation on aging and death, on memory, forgiveness, and redemption, The Rags of Time is also, in its ambitious interplay of history, politics, art, and life, a book that explores the very necessity of telling stories.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Central Park features prominently in this rambling final installment of Howard's Novels of the Seasons quartet. Plagued by heart trouble, an aging novelist is confined to her New York apartment, with slow walks through the park as her only relief. Soul-baring confessions, many of them rants, are directed against Bush and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as the narrator weaves commentary on contemporary events with meditations on her past as a writer and political activist. These thoughts, blended with detailed descriptions of her walks, become entries in her daybook. Characters from previous novels in the series reappear: Artie, the math Ph.D. candidate and his painter wife; Sylvie, an elderly refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria; Marie Claude, a recently widowed American history professor. But the narrator's main focus, in the most engaging passages, is three prominent figures: Christopher Columbus, Sir Walter Raleigh and Frederick Law Olmsted. Quotations and photographs flesh out learned reflections, but Howard's digressions are too lacking in direction to hold our attention through the endless high-brow references. The marks of a master—beautiful prose and ambitious structure—are not enough to hold together the rich strands of this patchwork novel. (Oct.)
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About the Author

Maureen Howard's nine previous novels include Grace Abounding, Expensive Habits, and Natural History, all of which were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award for best American fiction. Her 1978 memoir, The Facts of Life, was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition edition (October 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670021326
• ISBN-13: 978-0670021321
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,345,729 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant, humane, erudite and engrossing book, November 8, 2009

By 

Chaya Bhuvaneswar - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Rags of Time: A Novel (Hardcover)

Readers should not miss this beautiful book -- beautiful in its descriptions and the crisp economy of its prose, as well as in the photographs and illustrations that grace many of the pages. If you liked that big book on T.S. Spivet; if you are a fan of A.S. Byatt and Joanna Scott; or if you love Central Park, architecture, Renaissance and Cubist paintings; layered narratives that still engage with a driving story and a warmly honest single narrator -- you will LOVE this book.

The style is very visual. You are taken inside the mind of a writer who lives near Central Park and who circles through the Park often, discovering its treasures, while revisiting characters in her novels in dazzling flashes. The book's enormous talent is to make you care about the day to day experiences of this main writer-character -- a woman with an unmistakable voice who is increasingly confined and vexed by a heart condition. At the same time, you get a lot of flashes of a wider world -- a silly, misguided President called "Cheerleader" (hmm, "What Happened" readers, anyone?); the people the writer encounters in the hospital where she's taken after various medical events.

What stays with you, as you read the book is the arc of a life, the arc of a lovely marriage and what it's like to value every moment with grandkids. Every sentence is carefully crafted, looks effortless, yet holds a penetrating observation or a heartfelt thought.

The book has been highly anticipated and the previous novels in the series very well received critically. DON'T MISS IT!