The Time of Her Life

by Robb Forman Dew

Now restored to print -- the acclaimed second novel by the National Book Award-winning author of Dale Loves Sophie to Death and The Evidence Against Her . Claudia and Avery Parks, lovers since high school, are now in their thirties. Intelligent, charming, sympathetic, they seem to be the ideal couple, the perfect dinner-party guests, almost everything people should be -- except responsible. They are causally yet cruelly oblivious to the ways in which their words and actions affect other people, most particularly their talented 11-year-old daughter, who suffers the misfortune of being treated by her parents not as a child but as an equal.

An engrossing domestic tale by a novelist of the first rank -- an ideal selection for reading groups. Robb Forman Dew's first novel, Dale Loves Sophie to Death , received the National Book Award in 1982.

Genres: Fiction

289 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Granddaughter of US poet, essayist and political writer John Crowe Ransom. Godfather was US poet, essayist, academic Robert Penn Warren. Grew up between Baton Rouge, LA and Ohio, well-connected to Kenyon Review writers and artists. Attended but did not graduate from Louisiana State University.

Her first novel - Dale Loves Sophie to Death - won the 1982 National Book Award. She has taught at the Iowa Writer's Workshop and has received Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2007 she was awarded an honorary degree by Kenyan College.

Since 1977 Robb Forman Dew has been living in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where her husband Charles B. Dew is now the Ephraim Williams Professor of American History at Williams College. They have two sons.

Reviews

[TKieninger · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was impossible to stick with and after skimming MANY sections, I ended up stopping it altogether.

[Carol · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the poignancy of this book, it's nasty realism, and the well-drawn portrait of mental cruelty and neglect to children. Still, the book was a disappointment to me because he I disliked all of the selfish characters. It's kind of a vanity fair world, a place where there are no heroes to be found, and no one with an ounce of integrity. This doesn't make the book a bad one, it just make it less satisfying. It is hard to say who is the most insidious character. Claudia's complete passivity is odious, Avery's cruelty....... The novel is a bewildering array of narricistic individuals. I would have given this book 3 stars, just for its acerbity, but the ending came as a disappointment.

Dew's writing reminds me of Anita Brookner - and the people she describes are somewhat like F.Scott's Fitzgerald's crowd - self-centered, rich, spoiled, cruel.

Maybe the book does deserve 3 or 4 stars. I find that I have a surprisingly strong reaction to it!

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book so much that I feel compelled to review it. I read it many years ago, not long after it first came out—and multiple times since. I even bought a second-hand copy after it went out of print because I'd loaned out the first copy I owned. It's a difficult novel to read perhaps, but for me, the character of the daughter, Sophie, resonated so deeply. The depiction of Sophie, who has to become an adult long before she is ready and suffers as a result, is amazing. In the novel it's because of her parents and their self-absorption with a myriad of things, but for me, reading it the first time not long after I'd lost my parents as a teen, it captured exactly that feeling of a fleeting perfect moment—that will never be again. The way the author gets inside the minds of the main characters is mesmerizing. It's as if we're seeing what they're seeing at the same time they are. Highly recommended.

[Amanda Duffy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of three books I choose to reread every year during the week before Christmas.

It is a sumptuous and relentlessly depressing slide into the depths of wilfully solipsistic adulthood by a pair of oblivious parents who, by self-absorbed dysfunction, destroy the childhood of their only daughter.

For extra depressive oomph, most of the heavy-duty angst occurs at Christmastime. I wonder how the author knew her way around destroyed childhood so well.

Here is my favourite quotation:
"...During every instant of her life that she was happy she understood implicitly that in the next instant she might be miserable. In this knowledge there as a great deal of serenity; she never doubted for a moment that the worst could happen."

[Stephani]

I started this book a couple of weeks ago and am not very far. For some reason I was not able to get into it and I actually started another book instead. I can count on one hand the number of times that I have actually put a book down to start a different one. I am not sure if I am officially done with this book or will possibly pick it up again.

[Rachel · Rating 1 out of 5]

I can't believe I actually finished this book. Maybe I was hoping that it would redeem itself by the end but nope. I must say that after finishing this book, I am still confused as to what the plot or the storyline was. Very disappointing.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Never gets old. Percodan rings alarmingly true this time.