Minus time

by Catherine Bush

When Canadian astronaut Barbara Urie blasts into space, her disaster-relief worker husband is too busy to attend, and her adult children, Helen and Paul, are too conflicted to turn up, so NASA provides actors to stand in for her family at the Florida launch site. Naturally, this launches the horrified children into a whole new layer of identity crisis in Catherine Bush's Gen-X treatise, Minus Time. It's not that the Uries are a dysfunctional family--indeed Barbara, husband David, and engineering student son Paul are all hyper-achievers. But daughter Helen just wants to be normal, and while her mother makes history orbiting in space, she joins a radical group of animal liberationists and desperately pretends to have a normal, sitcom-perfect home life.

Minus Time offers glimmers of the themes of risk and safety that define Bush's follow-up novel, The Rules of Engagement, and doesn't shy away from sweeping themes like what it means to grow up Canadian in the shadow of U.S. culture. But at its rawest, Minus Time reveals the confusion and rage of a woman who can't quite forgive her mother for fulfilling career dreams at the expense of a dubious and elusive family ideal: "One day [Helen] pulled out Madame Bovary, which she read in hours, haunted afterward not by Emma but Emma's daughter, left behind at the end, ignored and half-wild, who had no clothes that fit her and had never been taught to read. What, she asked the dead and faraway M. Flaubert, was going to happen to her?" --Deirdre Hanna

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Canada

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Catherine Bush loves islands and northern landscapes. She is the author of five novels, including Blaze Island, the Canada Reads long-listed Accusation (2013), the Trillium Award short-listed Claire’s Head (2004), and the national bestselling The Rules of Engagement (2000), also a New York Times Notable Book and a Globe & Mail Best Book of the Year. She lives in Toronto and an old schoolhouse in Eastern Ontario and has spoken internationally about addressing the climate crisis in fiction. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Guelph and Coordinator of the Guelph Creative Writing MFA, based in Toronto. Her nonfiction has appeared in publications including the Globe and Mail, The New York Times Magazine, the literary magazine Brick, Canadian Notes and Queries and the anthology, The Heart Does Break (2009).

Reviews

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Minus Time: A Novel is the second book I've read by Canadian author Catherine Bush. I enjoyed this as much as Rules of Engagement. Minus Time is an interesting portrait of a nuclear family (to the extreme somewhat).
The story centers around Helen, daughter of Barbara, a Canadian astronaut currently circling the Earth in the space station trying to break the time away record. Her father David, travels the world trying to help people escape and cope with the destruction caused by earthquakes and other disasters. Completing the family is Paul, her brother, who is working on an architecture degree in Montreal.
Helen and Paul travel to Florida to view her mother's launch into space. Interestingly, they don't go to Cape Canaveral but watch it from a distance. They see on the news that a replacement family has been installed in the bleachers to observe the launch.
Helen returns to Toronto, decides to stop attending her university course and takes a job at a health food restaurant and becomes involved with a group of activists who are trying to make the world aware of the sufferings of animals (testing by cosmetic companies, cruel treatment by fast food companies, etc). She keeps her family secret from the friends she makes in the activist group, United Species - kind of a neat name, I think)
The story follows Helen as she tries to cope with her family life; it wanders from the past with Helen and Paul as youngsters and Barbara just starting her training as an astronaut and the stresses it places on the family; and moves back to the present.
All in all it's a very interesting story, well-written and if you're part of the nuclear family generation, there are things that are relatable. It made me look again at my family, with me on the West Coast, one brother on the East Coast, another in the center, and my sister with my father. It makes for a different family dynamic, neither good nor bad, just one that requires differing perspectives. All in all, a very interesting, entertaining, thoughtful story. (4 stars)

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m writing this while the cat tries to dislodge the only Christmas tree ornament from the potted plant that serves as a Christmas tree. I moved the plant so she couldn’t see the ornament, but she continues to yell at the base of the plant and stand on her back legs trying to reach the ornament that isn’t there anymore.

Much of reading Minus Time feels like being the cat: grappling toward something that might be there, that for paragraphs is there, but then is gone. The reader yells at the text wondering where the missing glittering gem of character motivation remains. Why does Helen not want her mother to be an astronaut? Why does she not want to be in the media? Why does she want to be an animal rights activist?

The characters act without motivation, but their actions are clear and engaging. In addition to an engaging plot, the novel does well with setting: no surprise that it won the Toronto City Book Award, the city descriptions are wonderful and the appearance of ravines will no doubt aid a doctoral dissertation down the road.

If it came to a knife fight between plot and character which side would you take?

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book and read it over and over. It came at all the wrong time technologically so it seems to anticipate the wrong future development--came along right as the internet exploded, but it reflects no awareness of this. Bad timing for an otherwise excellent exploration of one generation's (Gen X) relationship with its parents.

[J.J. Dupuis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Catherine Bush's debut novel establishes her as one of Canada's preeminent fiction writers, a fact borne out by her subsequent novels and short stories. Her choice to offer both third-person and first-person narration, alternating each chapter, gives the reader both an intimate view and an outsider's look at the family of a Canadian astronaut, and how that career path affects her family.
Bush incorporates science into her fiction extremely well, as seen in Minus Time and Blaze Island, which adds another fascinating layer to her intricate prose. In fact the two novels pair rather well. But anyone looking for a bold and skillful stylist would do well to start with Minus Time.

[Marilyn Boyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is actually the second time I’ve read this debut novel, as I was more knocked out by it this time than the last. I found it the best of Bush’s books, although Rules of Engagement is quite multilayered too. She deals with some of the same issues in these and other works, but the first to me is actually the strongest.

[Madina · Rating 5 out of 5]

im literally CRYING wtf. everything about this. the beautiful, ethereal, absolutely wonderful prose. the way i loved all the characters & understood them & wished the best from them. all the emotions that it left me exposed too. the bittersweetness & longing. IT'S THE PERFECT BOOK OK!!!!

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my second read of Bush's 'Minus Time'. I really enjoyed her themes of family and the space program.