Now Is the Hour

I am a neophyte when it comes to reading Spanbauer. I have a tendency to become heavily enamored with an author and read everything and anything from him/her that I can get my hands on 'til I run out. Happily, Spanbauer is my newest addictive author! I enjoyed "The Man Who Fell In Love With the Moon", which led me to read "Now Is the Hour". I don't care what anyone else may say about it being revamp. "Now Is the Hour" is the perfect book for people who appreciate rich character development, and keen studies of the human experience. "Now Is the Hour" has drawn me in faster and more deeply than "The Man Who Fell...", hands down. Oh, BTW, yes his preference for NOT setting off dialogue with quotation marks catches you off guard at first. You get used to it - quickly. After all, how often do you or the people in your life announce every utterance by waving their fingers in the air to let you know they are saying something?!?!? Thank you VERY much for your voice, Tom!!! ;-) -KSS

This was my first Spanbauer book and I was entranced from the first sentence. "Parmesan cheese,it all started with parmesan cheese" Great opening line. I am a women raised in a city married to Wisconsin dairy farmers son. His life may not have been quite as traumatic as Rigby John,but the book gave me quite a bit more insite in to growing up "on the farm". The voice of Rigby John comes through so true. You feel his pain,his joy,his confusion. His parents are so stuck in their asigned roles they don't know how to be anything but what they are. That their son escapes is a testement to his inner strengh. I am now a fan and can not wait to read another book by this wonderful author.

This story has grabbed my heart and won't let go, It is probably one of the best books I have read. I rooted for Rigby Jon all the way. Even though it is fiction, I could identify with Rigby Jon in many ways. I will be reading more if Tom Spanbauer's books.

One of the finest books that I have ever read, but not what I thought it would be when I purchased it. The reader truly becomes involved with the characters and shares their journey. A must read!

The time is 1967. The place is Pocatello, Idaho. Rigby John Klusener is seventeen and leaving home to go to San Francisco. Tom Spanbauer's amazing fourth novel is the story of how this young man got to this place in his life. It has to do with his discovering his sexual feelings for men, the repressive Catholic church and his sad, harsh parents: his mother who spends far too much time on her knees in the local Catholic Church and a father, described as a "dry drunk" who only once in Rigby John's life has told him that he is proud of him. His only friends are Billie Cody with the Simone Signoret voice and a body far too voluptuous for rural Idaho 1967 standards and two Mexicans, Flaco and Acho, who work for his father. Then he meets George Serano, an Indian who lives in a log cabin with his grandmother not far from the Klusener property; and nothing is ever the same again. I can probably count on one hand-- certainly there are fewer than ten-- the novels that have moved me to tears. Tom Spanbauer's NOW IS THE HOUR is one of them. I read no farther than page 32 of this long novel-- but like the road to a friend's home, a good novel is never long-- before my eyes were burning. Rigby John (the story is told from his point of view) recalls a happier time before his brother, Russell, who was born with a handicap and only lived 100 days, died: "When my mother's eyes were the only show in town, almond-shaped and hazel. . . Mom's hazel eyes were gold when she was happy. When her eyes were gold I could find myself inside them." Later in a particularly nasty scene between Rigby John and his mother, when she tries to stop him from going to a party and rips the iron cord from the wall, he says her eyes were not hazel but an ugly gray. Throughout the novel, he is obsessed with eyes. "Maybe it was just the sun, but for a moment, there was a big bright shine in his eyes. Gold in Dad's eyes, the way Mom's eyes get. I've looked for it ever since, but that gold shine in my father's eyes has been a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence." (Judy Collins ["My Father"] watched the Paris sun set in her father's eyes.) Rigby John, in a beautiful scene from the novel when he and George smoke the same Camel cigarette, sees gold bars in George's dark eyes, "Jesus in George's eyes." Mr. Spanbauer gets just about everything right in this wondrous book: the plot-- there are surprises along the way-- the characters, the attention to detail that makes rural Idaho in the 60's come alive, from Old Spice and English Leather to Snickers candy bars to S & H Green Stamps to Campbell's mushroom soup. Then there is the music of the times: "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," "Eleanor Rigby," "Georgy Girl," "Monday Monday," "To Love Somebody," "Light My Fire," "All You Need Is Love" and of course "Now Is The Hour," to name a few. This rich novel is about so much that is wrong with the world-- hypocrisy, racism, homophobia. But it is also about hope and love and possibilities. As I fi