Time's a Thief
A Novel
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
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.
Customer Reviews
Deeply asborbing, funny, sensitive coming-of-age novel
Time’s A Thief is a sort of American Brideshead Revisited, an engaging, deeply absorbing coming-of-age story in which our narrator, Francesca Varani, brought up working-class in a hard-luck, nowhere town, falls in love with an entire clan of elite Manhattanites. In the mid-1980s, whisked by a scholarship from her narrow world to Barnard, Francesca meets fellow-student Kendra Marr-Löwenstein, the reckless but magnetic daughter of the very wealthy, highly cultured Marr-Löwenstein family. Francesca is brilliant and observant, honest, hard-working and witty—but she is also a very vulnerable girl-woman yearning to find her way into a much bigger world than her own, and therefore dazzled by her new friend. Only gradually does she discover that not only Kendra but most of the Marr-Löwensteins are deeply, painfully, dangerously screwed up, destructive to themselves as well as others.
Firmani’s characters are vivid and memorable, her writing distinctive and sharp—and, despite the suffering Francesca eventually endures, studded with laugh-out-loud lines. I’ve given copies of Time’s A Thief to many friends. It makes a great present.