The History of Now

by Daniel Klein Narrated by Carrington MacDuffie

Overview

Small, almost imperceptible changes are rippling through the New England village of Grandville, altering it in ways its inhabitants cannot yet imagine. The sixty-five-year-old projectionist at the local movie theater encounters an unexpected love affair. The town's drama leader wrestles with self-doubt over a politically-correct play a New Yorker is pushing her to produce, while her teenaged daughter discovers long-lost black relatives living nearby. Laced through these episodes are stories that reach back to a seventeenth-century family in Rotterdam, an eighteenth-century migration by a farmer's lonely son, and a nineteenth-century underground railway journey by a gifted runaway slave. Each episode in Grandville's history comes to bear on the lives of current residents. Does every event, no matter how small or distant in the past, influence all events that follow?

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Klein (Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington) crafts a charming philosophical lesson in this story of destiny and history colliding in a fictional New England town. Wendell deVries, a solitary man with a "dog-like dedication to familiarity," operates the projection booth inside the Phoenix theater in Grandville, Mass., founded by his grandparents. He shows movies for New York "second-homers" and locals, except on Tuesdays, when his 37-year-old daughter, Franny, conducts drama club meetings. When Franny's set design is criticized by Babs Dowd, a well-known New York designer who challenges Franny's role as drama leader, Franny's life spins out of control and she lands in the sanitarium. Reluctantly agreeing to a buyout from Babs in order to take care of his family, Wendell must leave his insular world in the projection booth and face the real world. All the while, Franny's daughter, Lila, struggles to find her niche in high school. Blending the present-day story with tidbits from Grandville history, Klein brings the town vividly to life. As the drama unfolds, the actors remind us that destiny is writ in history. (Mar.)

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Library Journal

Despite its shortcomings, this sweet book is a satisfying read containing several aspects of a fine novel, including adequate character development, interesting philosophical meditations, and the ability to illuminate the intricacies of seemingly unexceptional small-town life. But Klein's story, set in the fictional, Richard Russo-like town of Grandville, MA, gets too often bogged down by throwaway dialog and the epiphanies the author forces on his characters. The book revolves around the de Vries family, which consists of Wendell; his unmarried thirty-something daughter, Franny; and her teenage daughter, Lila. Wendell and Franny have lived in tiny Grandville their whole lives, without any inclination ever to leave despite the gradual descent of well-off "second-homers" from New York City. Much like the town itself, all three characters eventually break out of their self-imposed shells to varying degrees, with varying results. Klein uses these characters to demonstrate how extensive personal growth can occur without leaving the confines of your small town. Recommended for large fiction collections.
—Kevin Greczek

Kirkus Reviews

How the past influences what follows, and how self-understanding inspires broader comprehension of all things: These are the themes of this gently philosophical family chronicle, the first volume of a planned trilogy. Klein, a veteran novelist and co-author of the whimsical bestseller Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar (2008), channels his inner Thornton Wilder in this piecemeal history of a New England village (Grandville, Mass.), which combines the family-album features of Our Town with the inconclusive fatalism of The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Its central narrative focuses on Wendell deVries, heir to and proprietor of the Phoenix, a former vaudeville theater that's now the local movie house, and on long-divorced Wendell's family. His unmarried daughter Franny, who spearheads Grandville's community theater group and publicly protests the Iraq War, carries burdens she'll be unable to keep bearing. Other plots embrace Franny's beautiful, headstrong teenaged daughter Lila; a guidance counselor obsessed with Harvard and with managing his daughter's future; miscellaneous do-gooders and miscreants, culture vultures and over- and underachievers; and-in a slowly developing subplot-a Colombian youth, Hector Mondragon, whose flight from his country's dangers and his own misdeeds will lead him eventually to Grandville, and a deeply ironic fulfillment of his American dream. The novel is both enriched and flawed by numerous historical flashbacks which preach the inevitability of the past's shaping power, and there are far too many such episodes in the book's final 100 pages. Furthermore, Wendell's hangdog decency, which includes a genuine yearning to discover the truth about his family's occludedethnicity, is far too reminiscent of Richard Russo's rumpled antiheroes-just as Klein's plot carries excessive reminders of Empire Falls. Absorbing, nevertheless, though the novel never lives up to the promise of its vivid early chapters and enormously appealing characters.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169904840
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	04/20/2009
Edition description:	Unabridged

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