Now It's Time to Say Goodbye

This is the first Peck book that I have read. I LOVED THIS BOOK. I will agree with a few reviewers that it can be difficult to read for confusion sake, but this book is written from multiple perspectives and each character gives their narrative. This book kept me hanging until the end and I loved that....take a chance and read it.... The gay sex is hardly offensive...It is a part of the characters of the book and does not go on and on as though it is a Harlequin Romance...

Dale Peck is a fascinatingly brilliant writer. From his first work - "Martin and John" - and his later compelling "What We Lost", Peck demonstrated that he was able to stir up a colossal tale in a few pages, stories that were so pungent that extending them beyond his usual 250 page format seemed to suggest overkill. Yet here in this 1998 epic, Kansas-Gothic novel, Peck proves that his imagination and courtship with the English language is fathomless. NOW IT'S TIME TO SAY GOODBYE is a long (460 page) novel that now suggests Peck could proceed in a Jamesian manner, further developing the myriad characters he has created for this fascinating tale. A story as complex as this defies reduction or outline, and I'm not sure that isn't part of Peck's drive. He sets up a place in Kansas in the middle of the country and there creates a town bifurcated in name, in race, and in history. Galatea is white, under the stringent influence of a matriarchal Rosemary Krebs who owns the territory both financially and through historical power. Galatia is the other side of the tracks of the same town, is black, and since its founding many years ago has been a town where blacks were never slaves. Both sides of this partitioned place have their secrets, misdeeds, histories of crime and sleuth, and both are populated with strong central characters as well as equal divisions of uncouth trashy folk. Into this microcosm enters (by invitation - a first hint of the many unresolved dilemmas in this story) a gay pair from New York - writer Colin Nieman and his lover Justin Time. The town is home to a white painter (Wade Painter) and his black lover Devine (aka Reginald Packman). The arrival seems to trigger all manner of collisions between the partitioned town and slowly we are introduced into the histories of both sides and how those histories continue to collide: an albino black boy Eric Johnson was thought to be lynched for rape of a white girl, mysteries abound about the disappearance of Lucy Robinson (the only person to whom old matriarch Rosemary Krebs could relate), and there are anti-gay, anti-black, and anti-white clashes that heightened the suspense. The ultimate driving force of the story is the all-consuming need to discover all the facts behind the disappearance of Lucy Robinson as she seems to have touched the lives of all those living in the split town. To push further down the path of story would be to sabotage the fresh reader's suspenseful journey Peck so adeptly paints. Peck's writing is such a pleasure to read, so lavish is his attention to atmosphere and play of words within the context of his story, that one can forgive the fact that certain of the multitudinous characters fail to develop beyond the first dip into the darkroom tray. But he is so adroit at finding the right manner to use dialogue in a way that truly suggests accents and colloquialisms, so able to maintain our attention through this long epic, that this minor flaw can be forgiven

I only write reviews of books I truly love. I don't have time to review books I don't enjoy. I want people to read the books I love. Therefore I am adding my five stars worth to the other reviews. I can understand how this book might elicit a wide range of reviews. Understand this: this book is not for the squeamish, or people who feel uncomfortable with monsters, both imaginary and real. This book is a wonderful thriller. The author has managed to create a gothic thriller set in the lonely environs at the center of our country. If this book does not make you afraid of the dark, or make you wince, or at the very least, make you feel uncomfortable, then please check your pulse.

In the twinned towns of Galatia and Galatea, Kansas everything means something else.This is the key to Dale Peck's astonishing third novel Now It's Time to Say Goodbye. Seven characters speak to us in their own distinct voice while a dozen or so more are revealed by a seemingly omniscient narrator.It is often hard to understand the meanings and motives at play, but how often do we really understand what we do? This book is about meaning, the power to take control of things through words and the ascribing of motives."People don't want the truth, they want explanations," Colin, a novelist, is told late in the book. Keep this in mind as you reach into the book and enjoy its stories, explore its unforgiving setting and learn to care about its richly made and mostly unloveable characters. Let yourself be astonished by what the human mind can do.

Dale Peck's new book is probably his best. The heartbreaking fragility of his first two books -- due not only to the author's age and the autobiographical nature of his writing, but the strange and shocking mix of the very real and the very imagined -- is gone. This mythic tale of a racially split Kansas hamlet is full of stories of the darkest and sometimes most outlandish variety, delivered to the reader by many of the town's longing citizens. Peck loves his town and details it with exquisite care; now baroque, now biblical, sometimes as bare as the flat stretches of dust-land so prevalent in the book's literal landscape, the prose engages and keeps moving, as the plot's complex design works for optimum story-pleasure. A book about self-mythologizing as a defense against trauma -- racial, sexual, romantic, familial -- "Now It's Time To Say Goodbye" bids farewell to Peck's sublime, solpisistic fictions, promising a wide and varied career ahead. This is an American potboiler for everyone. Forget cliche by-the-numbers realism like Richard Price's "Freedomland." If you really want to know what's going on in America, forget Price, forget Oprah, and read this book. Get ready to be shocked, in the only way that matters: there's a truly vital new American book out there. Yeah!