All Times Have Been Modern Elisabeth Harvor (Viking/Penguin), 352 pages, $35 cloth. Rating: NNNN
ELIZABETH HARVOR in a round table Sunday (October 24), 1 pm, Brigantine Room and reading with October 26. See listings page 44 for details.
Rating: NNNN
In her second novel, All Times Have Been Modern, Elisabeth Harvor moves through time and space with the ease of a trapeze artist. It’s the 60s, and 13-year-old Kay awaits a curtain call for her school play.
In those few minutes years pass, and she’s 20 and working at her parents’ studio selling crafts to tourists. It’s a seamless transition, this leap into womanhood accomplished with just one sentence.
The first half of Kay’s life her bohemian childhood in rural New Brunswick, her early marriage to a Polish émigré architect, travel in Europe, the publication of a slim novel, a home in Ottawa, children and a divorce flies by in a whirlwind in the first few chapters.
She lands in Montreal in the 80s, a sexual innocent with two grown sons, floating through temporary jobs, trying to write, treading water until love comes along. And it does, in the form of a much younger man who provides, as she puts it, an education of the heart and other body parts.
Harvor is a master at evoking intimacy with small details, like Kay’s description of “the tiny glisten of sound his mouth makes when he smiles in the dark.” And she does such a good job of immersing us in the confined space of Kay’s relationship with Galbraith that we’re startled when events like a dinner with her son intrude and we’re reminded that she has a life.
That life is being a writer, and Harvor reveals in her precise, poetic prose how art, like life and love, is all about process.
