Time's a Thief: A Novel

by B.G. Firmani Narrated by Emily Rankin

Overview

Eighties New York springs to gritty, vibrant life in this piercingly romantic and compulsively readable coming-of-age novel. A beautiful, sad, funny, altogether bewitching debut

Francesca "Chess" Varani is an ultra-bright, sassy, but vulnerable Barnard freshwoman from a blue-collar background in the vibrantly gritty New York City of the mid-eighties. She strikes up a volatile and somewhat toxic friendship with drama-queen classmate Kendra Marr-Löwenstein, and falls into the bewitching orbit of her Salingeresque, high-toned family. Upon graduation, she moves into the Marr-Löwenstein house in the West Village as a secretary/girl-of-all-work to the soignèe literary intellectual Clarice Marr (think Susan Sontag but blondly coiffed and dressed in Chanel) and receives the sentimental education and emotional roughing up New York bestows on all of its new arrivals-including a love affair with Clarice's glamorously damaged son, Jerry.The story is related by Chess in sadder but wiser fashion from the distance of a financially beset 2008 and the depths of a crap job taken of necessity, tinged with the poignancy of time and choices made and not made.

Editorial Reviews

JULY 2017 - AudioFile

Firmani has crafted a truthful coming-of-age story filled with complex emotions and credible situations. Francesca “Chess” Varani is in her first year at Barnard College in 1980s New York. Narrator Emily Rankin illuminates Chess’s character—innocent, easily impressed, dreamy, and hopeful. Chess becomes enthralled with classmate Kendrick Marr-Löwenstein, a rebellious Manhattan sophisticate. She finds Kendra’s outrageous attitudes and behaviors appealing. Later, Chess is hired as a personal assistant to Kendra’s mother, feminist author Clarice Marr. Rankin portrays the Marr-Löwensteins with all their upper-crust eccentricities in place. She also highlights Firmani’s impressive portrait of New York City from the 1980s through the events of 9/11. Chess experiences obsession, acceptance, betrayal, and, ultimately wisdom, in a debut novel that will fully engage listeners. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

John Cornwell's soulful memoir recreates the trouble-filled spiritual passage of a young Irish-Catholic man in post-World War II Britain. As a teenager, Cornwell spent five years in a West Midlands seminary, searching for role models and friends in an isolated, pressure-filled, all-male environment where some boys looked for romantic attachments while others tried to avoid the attentions of a pedophiliac priest. Finally, in a fit of adolescent rebellion, Cornwell left Cotton College and abandoned his dream of becoming a priest. But religious questions never left: He went on to write Hitler's Pope and The Pontiff in Winter. Ruminative and well written.

Publishers Weekly

By age 11, Cornwell had a well-deserved reputation as "an academic reject and troublemaker." Besides running with young thugs in London's East End, he had attacked a nun, a teacher at his school. But after a stranger molested him, he became a devout altar boy and, two years later, a priest-in-training at Cotton College. There he lost his Cockney accent, felt schoolboy crushes and constantly wrestled with an overzealous conscience, his scruples exacerbated by priest-teachers ranging from rigid to predatory. Helping him navigate stormy adolescence was the brilliant and sensible Father Armishaw, literature teacher and music lover, who cared for him as his own troubled father and volatile mother were never able to do. Readers who objected to Cornwell's controversial bestseller Hitler's Pope may not appreciate his portrayal of Catholics in the 1950s, and the memoir police may accuse him of erring on the side of invention, especially since he kept no diaries. Despite its occasional touch of narcissism-his culminating struggle is with "the embodiment of all those in my life who had failed to see my worth"-the book is a fine read. With a literary novelist's eye for detail and ear for dialogue, Cornwell has written a psychologically astute and often touching coming-of-age story. (June 13) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Cornwell, author, journalist, and fellow at Jesus College in Cambridge, England, here tells the story of his life at an all-male school in the 1950s. Son of a struggling working-class family in London, John was sent to Cotton College to become a Catholic priest. Here, during his teen years, he experienced the best and worst of pre-Vatican II seminary life. Some of his teachers were pious and dedicated men; others were sexual predators. He had close friendships and fierce rivalries with other boys and felt forbidden romantic attractions. Though Cornwell chose not to continue into the priesthood, this book is not a denunciation of the system. Instead, it is a bittersweet recollection of a vanished world of religious insights and social isolation that profoundly influenced the author's character. Part spiritual odyssey, part boarding school story, Cornwell's well-crafted memoir is filled with vivid descriptions of people and places and a young boy's struggle to find himself. Recommended for public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/06.]-C. Robert Nixon, MLS, Lafayette, IN Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

From the Publisher

Time’s a Thief is a terrific coming-of-age novel: B.G. Firmani perfectly captures the innocent longing and more complicated striving of a young person on the cusp of her adulthood.  This bittersweet, funny, and bighearted book is also a beautiful, precise elegy to a wilder, more alive New York City where anything seemed possible.”    
— Dana Spiotta, author of Stone Arabia and Eat the Document
                                                                                                                                                           
“B.G. Firmani's witty, intimate, and knowing voice is captivating, and will keep readers up way past their bedtime, as it did me, just to stay under its spell.  Time's a Thief tells the ageless story of a young woman who comes to New York City to be schooled, awakened, emotionally bruised, and heartbroken, until she grows wise enough to put the shambles of her life back together. It's a pleasure to accompany this heroine on her journey.”
— Lynne Sharon Schwartz, author of Rough Strife and Disturbances in the Field

"Firmani really captures the grit and promise of 1980s New York, with too many cigarettes and dingy punk shows, when it was both unusual and magical for kids to come...for school... A leisurely exploration of character and place that, when you connect to Chess, packs a wallop."
—Booklist

“Immediately absorbing...A compelling story of youthful infatuation, love, and disillusionment.”
—Library Journal
 
“Chess is an engaging character... funny and cool... Like last year’s Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler, it is the coming-of-age of a young woman under the influence of unwholesome Manhattan sophisticates; like the previous year’s City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg, it is a nostalgic paean to the city’s recent past.”
—Kirkus Reviews
 

JULY 2017 - AudioFile

Firmani has crafted a truthful coming-of-age story filled with complex emotions and credible situations. Francesca “Chess” Varani is in her first year at Barnard College in 1980s New York. Narrator Emily Rankin illuminates Chess’s character—innocent, easily impressed, dreamy, and hopeful. Chess becomes enthralled with classmate Kendrick Marr-Löwenstein, a rebellious Manhattan sophisticate. She finds Kendra’s outrageous attitudes and behaviors appealing. Later, Chess is hired as a personal assistant to Kendra’s mother, feminist author Clarice Marr. Rankin portrays the Marr-Löwensteins with all their upper-crust eccentricities in place. She also highlights Firmani’s impressive portrait of New York City from the 1980s through the events of 9/11. Chess experiences obsession, acceptance, betrayal, and, ultimately wisdom, in a debut novel that will fully engage listeners. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2017-01-23
In 1980s New York, a naïve young intellectual is entranced, employed, exasperated, and expelled by members of a wealthy family.Firmani's debut tells the story of Francesca "Chess" Varani from her first year at Barnard until "the day when youth finally died" two decades later, when she learns what became of a wealthy college friend named Kendra Marr-Löwenstein, whose writer mother she worked for as a personal assistant, whose musician brother she fell in love with, whose whole exotic, damaged family bewitched her then betrayed her utterly. Like last year's Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler, it is the coming-of-age of a young woman under the influence of unwholesome Manhattan sophisticates; like the previous year's City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg, it is a nostalgic paean to the city's recent past, studded with continual highbrow references. One character's personality is summed up by the fact that she reads Jürgen Habermas in the original German, another leaves a conversation about Ivan Chtcheglov's Formulary for a New Urbanism to puke in an umbrella stand, and everything Chess sets eyes on recalls one artist or another. Despite her generous hand with her encyclopedic knowledge of everything, Chess is an engaging character, often very funny and cool. From working-class Italian origins in a burg she calls Barfonia, she details her enchantment by the Marr-Löwensteins from the night she meets Kendra standing in the street at 4 a.m. with blue hair, a clutch purse sagging with dexies, and the air of "deposed royalty." She asks Chess for a light. "Of course I had a light. I was born with a Zippo in my hand," Chess tells the reader. The Marr-Löwensteins, Salinger-esque in some ways (the one Chess falls for is named Jerry), are the novel's biggest problem. Unremittingly described in the most extreme, overheated terms, not one of them ever seems like a real person, and they don't act like real people either, disappearing without a trace for years at a time, reappearing in places they can't possibly know Chess will be, both more awful and more magical than they need to be to engage our emotions. When all is said and done, one's love/hate relationship with this book leans to the side of love.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169325980
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	05/02/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Seminary Boy

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By John Cornwell

Random House

John Cornwell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0385514867

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Chapter One

Part One

Father Figures


1
On my last summer holiday at the minor seminary I ran into my father in the east London suburb of South Woodford. His heavy limp, a handicap from childhood, seemed more labored than I remembered. As he toiled up George Lane his hand motions were like a man steadying a skittish horse on a leading rein. His hair was plastered down with brilliantine and he was wearing a new raincoat, collar turned up in the manner of Humphrey Bogart. He accosted me affably with his familiar limelight smile, as if greeting an invisible audience somewhere above my head. Nobody would have guessed he had left my mother and his five children a year earlier.

Standing outside Woolworth's, chatting about the new soccer season, he was fishing for something in his trouser pocket. I glimpsed a ten-shilling note. Then he fetched out a large bright horse chestnut, a conker. Buffing it on his sleeve, he handed it over, saying: "Cheerio there, Jack."
I stood watching him until he was swallowed up in the lobby of the Majestic cinema, where a matinee was about to begin. He did not look back. I would not lay eyes on him again for forty-five years.

I was missing him, but he had always been more of a troublesome sibling than an ideal father. In any case, I had other father figures to contend with.


2
FatherJames Cooney, pastor of my early adolescent years, was an austere soul. He had a drawn gray face and blood-raw eyelids. His cracked celluloid clerical collar was the color of soiled snow. It was the rigid cheap sort that priests and seminarians could launder in seconds with a damp cloth. He would kneel at the altar rail in our empty church, eyes shut tight, grizzled head listing in concentration. When he looked up toward the tabernacle, he seemed to be adjusting his vision to the scene of his life's mission-the east London district of Barkingside. Father Cooney was in resigned exile from Skibbereen, County Cork.

From the age of eleven until I departed for the minor seminary, aged thirteen, to begin my education for the priesthood, I served Father Cooney's Mass at seven o'clock every weekday morning in what he called his "old bit of a church," dedicated to Saint Augustine the missionary to the English. On Sundays the people stood three deep in the aisles; latecomers huddled out in the yard. To reduce the pressure he celebrated an extra Mass on the southern border of the parish in a disused army hut next to a pet cemetery, where dogs, cats, and horses were buried beneath headstones. Father Cooney would gaze bleakly out of the hut window, disparaging "the pagan English customs over the way." I served Mass at the Camp, as we called it, before cycling up to Saint Augustine's to assist as censer bearer at the sung High Mass. In the afternoon I returned to serve at Solemn Benediction, when Father Cooney led the singing of his favorite hymn:

Lord, for tomorrow and its needs
I do not pray.

But Father Cooney was struggling to supply the needs of tomorrow in the form of a larger church. Holding up the offertory plates he would reproach us: "Copper! Copper! Where's the silver!" In the meantime he was watching the pennies. Around the church and the presbytery he wore a frayed, black-trying-to-be-green cassock. In winter he went shod in army boots; in summer, black canvas sneakers-what we called plimsolls-sometimes without socks. He chopped his own hair. When I stood close to him in the sanctuary on summer days, he smelled like a sack of fertilizer.

At High Mass, the segment of charcoal cake, painstakingly excised with a razor blade, was minuscule, the incense grains sparse. When I swung the censer high to make the smoke billow, he would come suddenly out of his meditative mode. "Not so briskly, child!" he would hiss. When we buried parishioners in the Catholic section of the local cemetery, the charcoal was a morsel of white ash by the time we reached the graveside. It seemed to me strange, Father Cooney swinging a cold, smokeless censer at the coffin. At Low Mass he would ease a teardrop of wine into the chalice. The candles on the altar were dark, guttering stubs appropriated from Our Lady's votive rack. He would light them at the last moment, and snuff them with a singed pinch before he had even finished the words of the Last Gospel.

He was a shy man. If we met outside church he would incline his head, silently acknowledging the bond between himself and his daily Mass server. Sometimes he made a peculiar noise, a substitute for saying anything definite: "Wisswiss . . . wisswiss." When the children gathered around him in the school yard he would make a nuisance-fly gesture: "Very good! So! . . . wisswiss . . . Run along now!" Addressing women, young or middle-aged, he would stand sideways on to them, bleakly descrying objects of curious interest in the distance. But I have seen him comforting in his arms a widow wracked with grief at her husband's graveside.

He was tireless in the service of the sick and the dying. I would see him out in all weathers on his rusty bicycle, visiting the inmates at the Claybury mental asylum and the bedridden at King George V Hospital. Careering unsteadily along the street, narrowly missed by buses and lorries, he gripped the handlebars with one hard-knuckled hand; the other would nurse the Sacrament within his breast pocket.

He was self-effacing. When he dropped an object from his arthritic hands, he would whisper to himself, bending over painfully: "Wisswiss . . . Imbecile it is!" If he caught the servers fooling around before High Mass, he would mutter: "Boys will be boys as the hills are green far off!" But he could get exasperated with our choir when they droned on beyond the Offertory. "Orate, frates . . . Enough of that!"

My mother used to say that when you confessed your sins to Father Cooney it was "like going on trial for your life." Often he made me repeat my purpose of amendment: "Say it again . . . As if you meant it, now!" But he always ended with the heartfelt murmur "Be sure now and pray for me-the unworthy sinner."

On Sundays he would preach on the gospel of the day before straying to his weekly hobbyhorse, the News of the World, which "desecrated the Sabbath by its very existence," lingering hissingly over that final sibilant. Then he would excoriate the barbershops which sold "prophylactics," which I associated in my innocence with mysterious idols of a false religion. "No dacent, upright Catholic gentleman," he would say, "should give custom to such a one as does the Divil's business now!"


3
Father Cooney recruited me as a candidate for the priesthood in this way. One Sunday evening I arrived at church early for Solemn Benediction. After vesting I looked into the sacristy. The room was silent, deserted. On the press stood the chalice in readiness for Mass the following morning. I had an urge to touch the receptacle. I went on tiptoe across the parquet flooring and grasped the embossed stem of the sacred cup. At that moment I heard a gasp. Looking back, I was seized with terror at the sight of Father Cooney perched on a stool behind the open sacristy door. He followed me with his eyes as I walked slowly past him, trembling, as if I had committed a profanity. He said not a word.

The following day, after early morning Mass, Father Cooney asked me what I hoped to be when I grew up. I said confidently that I hoped to be a priest. Within a day it was settled that I should try my vocation at a minor seminary, a boarding college where young boys began their long training for the priesthood. When Father Cooney put my name forward to the bishop as a candidate for the priesthood I was approaching my thirteenth birthday. I was already a Johnny-come-lately: many boys of my generation had begun their priestly formation at the age of eleven.

On the appointed day, my mother took me to an interview with the Right Reverend Bishop George Andrew Beck of Brentwood. She was dressed in her purple coat with padded shoulders, which she kept for special occasions; it was smart but her dress showed a few inches below the hem. I was dressed in my elder brother's navy blue jacket, temporarily stitched up at the sleeves. We sat at the front of the upper deck of the London Transport bus because Mum thought it a treat to have a view of the scenery on a journey. Riding northward from the bus stop outside Trebor's mint factory, we passed Hill's car showroom, festooned with bunting snapping in the spring breeze. Then we crossed the river Roding, with its smell of the sewage plant, and passed under the Central Line railway bridge on our way to the towering Majestic cinema. In all that journey, I reflected, there was not a single sacred image to be seen. That was how I had begun to think.

Bishop Beck's diocese took in the county of Essex with its new towns and the poor districts of London's East End, but he lived in the prosperous suburb of Woodford Green. The bishop's house was set back from the road amidst clipped shrubberies. A gleaming black limousine stood on the gravel drive. Monsignor Shannon, the vicar general, greeted us at the door. He was a stout man in a black suit, a cigarette perched between his fingers. He had a flushed face as if he had just climbed out of a steaming bath. He spoke to us softly, advising us to address the bishop as "My Lord." He ushered us into a room where the bishop sat at a desk with his back to French windows. He got up and held out his ringed hand for us to kiss.

He was a lean, dark-haired, exhausted-looking man with a sallow face. He was watching me intently through half horn-rimmed spectacles. I sat bolt upright on a straight-backed ornate chair trying to look alert and decent. He spoke for a while about Father Cooney's recommendation. Looking up at the ceiling, he said: "How lucky you are to have Father Cooney as your parish priest." Then he asked my mother if she would mind waiting outside.

He handed me a piece of paper and a pencil and dictated a passage from Saint John's gospel, which I did well. Then he wanted to know how many bedrooms we had in our house, and about the sleeping arrangements. I said that my three brothers and I, and sometimes my father too, slept in one room, sharing three single beds. He asked if my father and elder brother went to church, and I said that Dad never went to church, even at Christmas. He wanted to know how I liked my school. I said I liked it well enough. I had no inclination to tell him of the fights in the school yard and the impure larks in the evil-smelling latrines.

"If you are to be a priest one day," he said eventually, "you will have to study hard to be an educated man. Ordination alters your entire soul . . . You must become a holy man."

He asked how I felt about going away to a boarding school, the minor seminary. "You might be homesick," he said. "What do you think about that?"

I tried not to betray my anxiety. I was afraid that I might say something that would make him withdraw the suggestion. "I would like that very much," I whispered.

Then he called my mother back, and it was my turn to go out into the hallway, where Monsignor Shannon was at the ready with a biscuit and a glass of milk.

When Mum emerged, accompanied by the bishop, I could tell from her expression, a pious look she wore in church after taking Communion, that everything had been agreeably settled. The bishop explained that since our diocese was poor it had no minor or senior seminaries of its own. He would have me lodged in a seminary owned by one of the larger, more prosperous dioceses of England. "It will be a long way from home," he said, with a warning look.

I tried to appear intrepid.

On the bus, I surveyed the godless landscape, rejoicing inwardly that I was soon destined to depart for a very different world, where there would be constant visible reminders of the Mother of God and the kingdom of heaven. Eventually Mum patted me on the arm and said she was proud of me. When we reached home, the house that went with my father's job on the sports ground, she looked down at me with her lustrous gray eyes. "I just wonder whether it's really you," she said. "But we'll see . . . I should be so proud! And as your saintly grandmother used to say: Gain a priest-never lose a son."

Later Dad came in from the sports ground wearing his overalls. Dad and Mum had not been speaking to each other for some days. He had not been consulted about my visit to the bishop or its purpose. He appeared less pleased than Mum as she reported the proceedings of the morning. He was blinking frequently, as he often did when he was puzzled or nervous. He said: "Are you sure, son?"

I had not the capacity to consider what it meant for Dad to be informed, without reference to his opinion, that I would leave home that autumn to begin my education for the priesthood. I did not consider his feelings or his opinion of any significance. I was filled with a sense of glowing ripeness and anticipation.


4
My mother, Kathleen, whose maiden name was Egan, was desperate on learning in the autumn of 1939, days after Britain declared war on Germany, that she was pregnant again. She was twenty-five years of age. It would be her third child under three and the family was destitute. In those days the family lived in East Ham, a working-class district close to the London docks north of the river Thames. According to Mum's stories, Dad was out all day seeking casual labor by the hour on the wharves. He had a withered, unbending left leg and was always among the last to be hired.

If she had another baby, how should she manage? And to bring another child into a world at war! Mum began to pray day and night that she would lose the baby. Then she grew anxious. Was it a mortal sin for a pregnant mother to pray for a miscarriage? She went to see her parish priest of those days, Father Heenan. According to Mum, the priest, from where he sat, extended both his legs, stiff at the knees, to reveal the holes in his shoes right through to his socks. He said: "Kathleen, we're all poor. Trust in God: he will provide!" She began to pray fervently to Saint Gerard Majella, patron saint of childbirth, for the safe delivery of the baby that was me.

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Excerpted from Seminary Boy by John Cornwell Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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