Mean Time

by Christopher Leland

In a small Southwestern town, three people--an ex-convict murderer, his child-bride wife, and a snake-charmer hired-hand--weave a web of desire, jealousy, regret, and hope that will ensnare one of them in murder

Hardcover

First published September 1, 1982

Reviews

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The "mean time" of the title is the ten-year prison sentence served by Dewey Monroe, and the passage of that intervening decade for his young wife, Carrie, and their community, a fictional small town that in places feels Southern or Western. But the cruelty of the temporal in this novel is not limited by the relatively small swath of land and culture it contains; nor the cruelty of human limitation, by time: the ubi sunt tone is a response to the question of whether escaping the past -- familial, cultural, or historical -- is truly possible, a response the novel delivers with just enough hope and light to balance the lives it presents.