Wednesday, June 12, 2019

"Time After Time"

Lisa Grunwald is the author of the novels The Irresistible Henry House, Whatever Makes You Happy, New Year’s Eve, The Theory of Everything, Summer, and the newly released Time After Time. Along with her husband, Reuters Editor-in-Chief Stephen J. Adler, she has edited the bestselling anthologies Women’s Letters and Letters of the Century. Grunwald is a former contributing editor to Life and a former features editor of Esquire. She and Adler live in New York City.

Grunwald applied the Page 69 Test to Time After Time and reported the following:
I’m not sure I could have found a less representative page of Time After Time than page 69. My main character (Nora) has gone to visit her father (Frederick) in his hospital room. Nora (and we) will never see this hospital room or Frederick again. In fact, the scene mainly exists in technical service of the plot. Frederick’s illness is the reason Nora comes to New York from Paris; her visit to the hospital is the reason she doesn’t go straight home from the dock where her ship has landed; her heading home after the hospital visit is the reason she winds up in the accident that is the central event of the novel. So, the main setting of the novel (Grand Central Terminal) and the other main character (Joe Reynolds), and the obstacles they face are nowhere present—or even foreshadowed—on page 69.

And yet I think the page does reveal something of Nora’s personality. On page 69, we see her being strong, loving, concerned—and complicit with her father in decrying her mother’s imperious nature. When she tells Frederick that her roommate’s flipped-up haircut makes her look like a playing-card king, we see her levity and her eye for detail. All these elements, but above all the love and determination that have brought Nora to Frederick’s room, will be among the qualities that so attract Joe—and that I hope will endear her to the reader as well.
Visit Lisa Grunwald's website.

--Marshal Zeringue