The Rags of Time

By Maureen Howard

Book Overview

The concluding volume in a quartet of highly acclaimed novels that include A Lover's Almanac, Big as Life , and The Silver Screen Maureen Howard's new novel is the last in a beautifully written and boldly structured cycle of four books, woven as a tapestry of the seasons, that critics have praised as "brazenly intelligent," "daredevil clever," and "raptly adventurous." The Rags of Time tells of an aging Manhattan writer with an ailing heart who lives near Central Park, who is reviewing and examining both her own history and the lives she has imagined in her fiction. Interlaced are private rambles and public facts: daily strolls through the park; the tough love between her and the two men in her life, her husband and her brother; three mythmaking figures from history (Columbus, Walter Raleigh, and Frederick Law Olmstead) who matter prominently to her and her work; and updates on the lives of her fictional characters (an improbable mathematician, his lapsed artist wife, a woman historian in mourning). A moving meditation on aging and death, on memory, forgiveness, and redemption, The Rags of Time is also, in its ambitious interplay of history, politics, art, and life, a book that explores the very necessity of telling stories.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670021326
• ISBN13: 9780670021321
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Length: 238 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.2"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A brilliant, humane, erudite and engrossing book

Readers should not miss this beautiful book -- beautiful in its descriptions and the crisp economy of its prose, as well as in the photographs and illustrations that grace many of the pages. If you liked that big book on T.S. Spivet; if you are a fan of A.S. Byatt and Joanna Scott; or if you love Central Park, architecture, Renaissance and Cubist paintings; layered narratives that still engage with a driving story and a warmly honest single narrator -- you will LOVE this book. The style is very visual. You are taken inside the mind of a writer who lives near Central Park and who circles through the Park often, discovering its treasures, while revisiting characters in her novels in dazzling flashes. The book's enormous talent is to make you care about the day to day experiences of this main writer-character -- a woman with an unmistakable voice who is increasingly confined and vexed by a heart condition. At the same time, you get a lot of flashes of a wider world -- a silly, misguided President called "Cheerleader" (hmm, "What Happened" readers, anyone?); the people the writer encounters in the hospital where she's taken after various medical events. What stays with you, as you read the book is the arc of a life, the arc of a lovely marriage and what it's like to value every moment with grandkids. Every sentence is carefully crafted, looks effortless, yet holds a penetrating observation or a heartfelt thought. The book has been highly anticipated and the previous novels in the series very well received critically. DON'T MISS IT!