Customer Reviews

There Was a Time

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Since Amazon didn't post an editorial review, here's the description from the back of the book to help you decide if this book is for you: "Two beautiful women wanted FrankClair -- the handsome, talented, sensitive artist aflame with an adventurer's passion for life, and with a bursting lust for money, fame, and women ... One would give him all she had -- a voluptuous blonde beauty forced by poverty into prostitution. It was she who first took this twisted, angry young man and taught him his earliest, sou-shattering lessons in tenderness and passion .... And one would take all he had to give -- a ravishing, highborn, dark-haired vixen who taunted the young writer for his crude, urgent longings, and yet spurred him on to incredible heights of literary achievement and fame ..."

"There was a Time" is the story of Frank Clair, a young
English writer and immigrant to the United States. Like
Caldwell's other characters, Frank suffers from a fatal
flaw: his once passionate artist's nature has been warped
by his miserly parents until he is a bitter shell of a man
whose only concern is money. He compromises his writing to
achieve his obsession with wealth.
As always, Caldwell characters are multifaceted, tormented
people whose thoughts and actions are so well described that
the reader sympathizes with their plight. Caldwell's
lyrical prose makes this especially good reading for those
disgusted with simplistic, poor writing. While "There was
a Time" is not Caldwell's best work (to me, the ending was
abrupt, and did little justice to the complexity of
the work), it is a fine introduction to this prolific author
and a must for her continuing devotees.

Taylor Caldwell's "There was a Time" is a bleak but unsatisfying view of life for the poor in America in the early part of this century. It focuses on the struggle of Frank Clair to rise above his friendless and loveless circumstances to become a successful writer. Despite some promising settings and characters (the hills of Kentucky, the factories and schools of upstate New York, the Depression), and the potential to say something about the big issues of the times such as poor industrial conditions, segregation, anti-British setiment during WWI, the book in the end does nothing except follow the mopings of the protagonist from emotional failure to disappointing moment. The book is also quite sloppily written with some glaring continuity errors. None of the characters which are remotely likeable stay around for long.