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 masterβbeautiful prose and ambitious structureβare not enough to hold together the rich strands of this patchwork novel. (Oct.)
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Product Description
The magnificent conclusion of Maureen Howard's ambitious quartet of novels.
Maureen Howard is one of America's most esteemed authors, beloved both for the lyricism of her writing and her dazzling intellect. The Rags of Time is a moving meditation on memory and imagination that, in its interplay of history, politics, art and life, explores the very necessity of telling stories. Focusing on a New York writer with an ailing heart as she reviews her own history and the lives she imagined in her fiction, the novel interlaces the sorrows and consolations of private moments with the undeniable memory of the public record. The result is nothing less than a deeply profound exploration of American life.