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21 Now It's Time for Dale Peck In a hundred-sixty-one chapters distributed among seventeen characters , fourteen of whom speak in first person, Now It's Time to Say Good-bye (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NewYork, \ 998), Dale Peck's third novel, describes a racially split Kansas town, by the end of which description, with lynchings and retributive murders, we have a picture of Galatea (the town's white side)/Galatia (the black side) and have encountered at least one affecting love story between an effeminate black twelve-yearold , Reggie Packman, and a slightly older redneck sociopath, Lemoine Weibe (aka Ratboy). The affair ends twoyears later when, hustling at the Big M truckstop, the now sixteen-year-old Ratboy is brutally beaten and eventually dies. Some symmetrical development occurs: Fleeing urban AIDS, writer Colin Nieman and the twenty-year-old New York hustler he brings with him to Galatea, Justin Time, and local artist Wade Painter with his local lover (Reggie P. a few years on, now aka Divine), change partners after the town has traumatized both boys. When white teenager Lucy Robinson is raped and kidnapped, the town tries halfheartedly to pin the crime on Golin. Mysteries,arsons, and murders proliferate; and after a catastrophic Founders' Daypicnic, the main question (who raped Reggie and Lucy and beat Justin into psychotic aphasia) resolves. Once, however, minister Greevin's daughter, Webbie, suggests out of the blue someone we've thought dead for the novel's first three hundred fifty-odd pages is alive, for the concluding hundred it's not much of a mystery. Now and again, however, Peck informs passages with impressive narrative life. If it all sounds satisfying, you may well like the book. I found it rough reading, however. Multiple viewpoints work in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying because Faulkner's fifteen narrators (at less than half the length!) aim their observations at one intense and human situation: Addie Bundren's protracted death. They don't work here because Peck's plot lolls over twenty years and as many major incidents Now It's Time for Dale Peck 385 (Eddy Comedy's murder, Noah's Ark's burning, EricJohnson's lynching, Divine's suicide attempt, Webbie's flight to Wichita . . . etc.) till the shifting viewpoints and narrative voices (from Reggie'sjiving to Rosemary's Whartonesque periods toJustin's Fitzgerald-like detachment to Thelma's Faulknerian eruption; Peck is quite a stylistic ventriloquist) only disperse the focus. And because so many of our informants know somuch, for all its mysteries Peck's novel iswithout suspense. A greater problem is, however, that, with plot enough for six novels, Peck's hasn't much structure: In the MFA programs that produce more and more of them, our novelists never seem to learn that the order in which they think up the incidents for their tales is not privileged or even, necessarily, interesting. If handled well, our learning about a character's historyfirstcan sensitize us to his or her latterlypresented injury or pain, if that later injury is rendered meaningfully in terms of the history already given. But (numbed by the notion of the commercial "hook"? It's only a sign of genre and accomplishes nothingmore) too manywritersbelieve a violence that befalls an otherwise unknown character will subsequently interest us in that character's past life, when, if anything, the opposite is true: In a novel, a violent occurrence to a character armors us against further emotional involvement, despite anything of their former life we learn about them later. In brief, if I'm tellingyou about Joe's adult doings, and I realize things would make more sense with some background on Joe's upbringing, the fact that I (the writer) only noticed it then is no reason to put it next in the book. It was already a narrative problem when I noticed. It should be addressed in the text beforehand. Had we seen Myra's childhood relationship with Lucy before her daughter's abduction (instead of having those memories dragged in later, like the novelist's—not the character's—sentimental afterthoughts), Myra's subsequent breakdown would havej'elt to the reader as human as we all knowit is.Had the fill-in narratives about Rosemary, Myra, and the Kenosha fire that produced Galatea's present-day tensions, along with the childhood tales of Eric and Lucy, all of which come in the final hundred pages, been given us instead in thefirst hundred, the ending would have...

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