A time to dance

Description

This marvelous novel chronicles the year leading up to the sixtieth wedding anniversary of Max and Bunnie Howard, a failed novelist and his academic wife, a couple of aging bohemians who never grew up. Theirs, we quickly learn, was a marriage characterized by heavy drinking, mutual infidelities, and riotous parties in the genteel demi-monde of Nashville. But when Bunnie suffers a stroke, their days of feckless independence are over, and it is their good-natured and long-suffering nephew Julien who finds himself in charge, trying to save the couple - especially Max - from their worst impulses. With Bunnie still in the hospital, Julien becomes involved with Shannon, a strong-willed nurse seeking redemption from the tragic mistakes of her own harrowing past, and the younger couple's struggle to build a responsible relationship seems in absolute counterpoint to Max and Bunnie's history. Back home, Max and his invalid wife muddle through the year, beset by doctors, irascible housemaids, and the vicissitudes of their own flesh, vicissitudes that sometimes evolve into sheer slapstick. Bunnie's attempt to share Max's bed requires the intervention of paramedics. Max tries to drive to the cemetery to visit the grave of a literary and romantic rival and finds himself involved in a wild encounter with truckers and police. How can the Howards make sense of a life that suddenly seems to have passed with such bewildering haste and left them blinking and reeling in its wake? Bunnie tries by embarking on a novel, innocently plagiarizing scenes and lines from authors as diverse as Shakespeare and Joyce. Max drinks, reflecting tipsily upon his various shortcomings, as a husband, as a novelist, as a man. For both, images of botched seductions and old lovers loom through a fog of memory and confusion, and what becomes clear is the pathos of their doomed search for a chimera of perfect love. By turns comic and heartbreaking, A Time to Dance moves unerringly toward its conclusion at Max and Bunnie's anniversary celebration. By then what we come to recognize in Max and Bunnie is neither their recklessness nor their betrayals but their sweetness, the gallantry of their pursuit of more than life offers, and their deep and abiding love for each other. A Time to Dance is a novel that presents the human condition with humor, compassion, and hope.

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