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WORK TITLE: The Timekeeper’s Son
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.saratbaker.com/index.html
CITY: Athens
STATE: GA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
Husband is physicist and author Todd Baker.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married Todd Baker (physicist and author); children: four.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, poet, novelist, short story writer, dramatist, and educator. Taught English literature and writing at the college level for fifteen years; designed and facilitated a writing-to-heal workshop for cancer patients and caregivers at the Loran Smith Center for Cancer Support, Athens, Georgia.
AVOCATIONS:Gardening and dancing.
AWARDS:Finalist for the Gertrude Stein award and the Hemingway Days First Novel Contest; Hambidge Center fellowship; scholarships to the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.
WRITINGS
Contributes fiction to print and online literary journals, including Crab Orchard Review, Cleaver, Confrontation, H.O.W. Journal, China Grove, theintima.com, the Examined Life Journal, the New Quarterly, and the Lullwater Review. Poetry published in periodicals, including the Apalchee Review, the Healing Muse, and Ars Medica; poetry published in anthologies, including Stone, River, Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poetry, and The 2011 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. Radio play A Wagner Matinee was aired on BBC Radio and National Public Radio.
SIDELIGHTS
Sara Baker writes both fiction and poetry, both of which appear in literary journals. A former English literature professor, Baker suffered an illness and other life events that led her to develop a write-t0-heal workshop based in Athens, Georgia, and designed for both cancer patients and caregivers. She ran the workshop for eleven years, during which time she wrote about the field of expressive writing. “Writing is how I explore the world, how I make sense of it,” Baker noted in an interview for the Book Goodies website, adding: “I think it was Joan Didion who said that she didn’t know what she thought until she wrote it down. I am interested in the inner world of my characters, in their journeys and how they make moral choices in a chaotic world.”
In her debut novel, The Timekeeper’s Son, Baker tells the coming-0f-age story of a teenager who hits a jogger during a late night drive. The accident is devastating in various ways for young Josh Lovejoy and his entire family. In addition, the jogger, who turns out to be a prominent local activist and historian, David Masters, was going to run for office but is now lying in the hospital in a coma. “Baker places the reader … in the heart and soul of a troubled young man; the plot, however, is diagnostic, addressing not only Josh’s ‘troubles’ but the delicate equilibrium of his family and the Masterses’ family,” wrote Daniel James Sundhal in a review for the Literary Lawyer: A Forum for the Legal and Literary Communities website.
The story begins in the small Georgia town of Milledge. Josh wants to become a filmmaker but soon finds his life in turmoil because he was high at the time he hit David. Josh is already estranged from his father, who does not have a favorable view of Josh’s desire to become a filmmaker, which has led Josh to have questions of self-worth. The incident also causes Josh to become alienated from his mother as well as his friends. Still in shock, Josh begins his court-ordered community service at the Good Shepherd School for Disabled Children. However, his culpability could change drastically if David dies.
Meanwhile, Josh’s mother, Helen, who is a failed painter with a fragile psyche, falls into depression. Josh’s dad, Hal, is a stern clockmaker who decides to leave his family to their own devices and moves into his shop to live. The Lovejoy family is not the only family devastated by the accidents. Meg, David’s wife, is a childless, third-grade teacher who understandably has numerous negative feelings about Josh as her initial grief evolves into anger and resentment, even though she sometimes imagines Josh as the son she could have had. Meg also has issues with her husband.
Although comatose, David’s inner life goes on as he receives regular visits from the late singer Peggy Lee. “The singer’s soulful, sympathetic presence triggers sustained flashbacks in which David relives the painful episodes of his youth that formed his sharp awareness of social and racial injustice,” noted Southern Literary Review website contributor Molly Hurley Moran. As the story progresses, Josh continues to fantasize about being a famous filmmaker. However, when an unstable girl he is in love with goes to New York City, Josh follows. The big city only compounds David’s feelings of being overwhelmed. Eventually, he makes a decision, and his family cannot help him avoid the consequences of it.
“Baker deftly explores themes of grief and forgiveness, isolation and connection, masks and disguises, all while depicting … characters’ lives with tender intimacy,” wrote a Small Press Bookwatch contributor, who went on to call The Timekeeper’s Son “a superbly crafted novel.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked: “This is a serious and engrossing exploration of tragedy and the emotions that come with it.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2017, review of The Timekeeper’s Son.
Small Press Bookwatch, September, 2017, review of The Timekeeper’s Son.
ONLINE
Book Goodies, https://bookgoodies.com/ (June 9, 2018), “Interview with Author—Sara Baker.”
Literary Lawyer: A Forum for the Legal and Literary Communities, https://allenmendenhallblog.com/ (December 13, 2017), Daniel James Sundahl, review of The Timekeeper’s Son.
Sara Baker Website, http://www.saratbaker.com/index.html (June 9, 2018).
Southern Literary Review, http://southernlitreview.com/ (September 19, 2017), Molly Hurley Moran, review of The Timekeeper’s Son.
Sara Baker's fiction has been widely published in literary journals, including the Crab Orchard Review, Cleaver, Confrontation, H.O.W. Journal, China Grove, theintima.com, The Examined Life Journal, The New Quarterly, The Lullwater Review. Her work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Fish Short Story Contest. Her poetry has been published in Stone, River, Sky: an Anthology of Georgia Poetry, The 2011 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, The Apalachee Review, The Healing Muse, Ars Medica, and elsewhere.
After teaching English literature and writing at the college level for fifteen years, Sara’s own experience with illness and loss spurred her to design and facilitate a writing-to-heal workshop for cancer patients and caregivers at the Loran Smith Center for Cancer Support in Athens, Georgia. Over the eleven years she ran those workshops, she presented and published extensively in the field of expressive writing. Her passion to share the healing that can emerge from writing comes directly from her own experiences.
Sara lives in Athens, Georgia, with her husband, physicist and author Todd Baker. They have three grown children, one almost grown, and are grateful to live in such a wonderful community. When not writing or teaching, Sara is an avid gardener, dancer and dog lover.
Contact: saratbaker@gmail.com
Sara Baker's fiction has been published in Cleaver, Confrontation, H.O.W. Journal, The China Grove Journal, The Intima.com, The Examined Life Journal, The New Quarterly, The Lullwater Review and other venues and has been shortlisted for the Bridport and Fish contests. Her poetry has been published in Stone, River, Sky: the Negative Capability Press Anthology of Georgia Poetry, The 2011 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, The Apalachee Review, The Healing Muse, Ars Medica, and elsewhere.
After teaching English literature and writing at the college level for fifteen years, Sara’s own experience with illness spurred her to design and facilitate a writing-to-heal workshop for cancer patients and caregivers at the Loran Smith Center for Cancer Support in Athens, Georgia. Over the eleven years she ran those workshops, she presented and published extensively in the field of expressive writing.
Sara lives in Athens, Georgia, with her husband, Todd Baker. They have four grown children, and are grateful to live in such a wonderful community. When not writing or teaching, Sara is an avid gardener, dancer and dog lover. Please visit her website, www.saratbaker.com and her blog, Word Medicine, www.saratbaker.wordpress.com.
Interview with Author – Sara Baker
By Book Goodies Leave a Comment
SaraBaker
About Sara Baker:
Sara Baker’s fiction has been published in Cleaver, Confrontation, H.O.W. Journal, The China Grove Journal, TheIntima.org, The Examined Life Journal, The New Quarterly, The Lullwater Review and other venues and has been shortlisted for the Bridport and Fish contests. Her poetry has been published in Stone, River, Sky: the Negative Capability Press Anthology of Georgia Poetry, The 2011 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, The Apalachee Review, The Healing Muse, Ars Medica, and elsewhere. Her work has been shortlisted for the Eludia award, and she has been a finalist for the Gertrude Stein award, and the Hemingway Days First Novel Contest, among other awards. Her screenplay, One of Us, was a finalist in the CineStory screenplay contest, and her radio play A Wagner Matinee, was aired on BBC Radio and NPR. She has been a fellow at the Hambidge Center, and has received scholarships to the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. She has an M.A. in English from Boston College.
After teaching English literature and writing at the college level for fifteen years, Sara’s own experience with illness and loss spurred her to design and facilitate a writing-to-heal workshop for cancer patients and caregivers at the Loran Smith Center for Cancer Support in Athens, Georgia. Over the eleven years she ran those workshops, she presented and published extensively in the field of expressive writing. Her passion to share the healing that can emerge from writing comes directly from her own experiences. Her writing helped her regain a sense of self and ultimately heal.
Sara lives in Athens, Georgia, with her husband, physicist and author Todd Baker. They have three grown children, one almost grown, and are grateful to live in such a wonderful community. When not writing or teaching, Sara is an avid gardener, dancer and dog lover.
What inspires you to write?
Writing is how I explore the world, how I make sense of it. I think it was Joan Didion who said that she didn’t know what she thought until she wrote it down. I am interested in the inner world of my characters, in their journeys and how they make moral choices in a chaotic world.
Tell us about your writing process.
I do not outline. I start with an image, or an intuition about a situation. The Timekeeper’s Son, my latest book, is a novel inspired initially by a newspaper piece about a boy who ran in front of a car and caused an accident. Evidently, the child had a lot of emotional problems. I flashed on an image of his parents, the back story of his and their struggles, and the image drew into it a lot of other concerns that had been floating around in my mind: How do people sustain community in dire times? What happens when schools are underfunded? How does a boy go forward into manhood when he does not have a good relationship with a father? Josh, the 17 year-old protagonist, is not supported in his creativity by his clock-obsessed father. Issues of race and history came into it, organically.
For Fiction Writers: Do you listen (or talk to) to your characters?
When the writing is going well, I listen and watch my characters. It really feels as if I am simply taking notes as they go about their business! But it doesn’t always flow. I treat writing as a job: I try to get to my desk at 9 and work until one. I need to walk or swim before I settle down to work. I also take time in the morning to do some yoga, meditate and write a few morning pages. These routines are really important to me. I don’t get on the internet until after one, and I do not take my iPhone up to my study. I don’t play music in the morning, but I do in the afternoon, when I attend to more “business” type things. I write drafts initially by hand, then put the work into the computer, print it out, revise by hand, print it out, etc. I write many drafts: I wrote 7 full drafts of this book.
What advice would you give other writers?
Read, read, read. Write, write, write. Get feedback, but don’t write by committee. That is, don’t workshop your piece to death. Don’t show it to anyone until it is pretty well done, and then take criticism with a grain of salt. Push outside your comfort zone, challenge yourself, but also believe in yourself. Nadine Gordimer said writing fiction is like being a tightrope walker: you can’t look down. Be yourself. Write for yourself first. Choose good models, but don’t try to write like someone else.
How did you decide how to publish your books?
I am very happy I published with a small publishing house, Deeds Publishing. They have given my book the personal attention a larger house might not have. They are a local company, and I like being able to drop in and talk about business with them–they always have time for me. I think publishing locally is like eating locally–you have a more individual, artisanal product. Also, we have a great independent bookstore, Avid Bookshop, which features local authors. It makes the whole enterprise of publishing much more of a community endeavor.
What do you think about the future of book publishing?
Wow, that is a tough one. I think it will be decentralized, as it is becoming. I know that I tend to like to read off-beat books from independent presses. The problem is that the big houses have become so profit-driven they only want a sure thing. Which makes them cautious and insular. I suppose they will continue to exist, but I hope that independent presses and authors will get more of the market.
What do you use?: Professional Editor, Professional Cover Designer, Beta Readers
What genres do you write?: Literary Fiction, Family Life, Women’s Fiction
What formats are your books in?: Both eBook and Print
Baker, Sara: THE TIMEKEEPER'S SON
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Baker, Sara THE TIMEKEEPER'S SON Deeds Publishing (Indie Fiction) $17.95 9, 20 ISBN: 978-1-
944193-56-0
A literary novel follows two Southern families connected by an accident. Josh Lovejoy has enough
problems as a 17-year-old in Milledge, Georgia--a stern father and filmmaking dreams he's unsure how to
pursue--before he gets high and drives into a jogger. The runner turns out to be David Masters, a beloved
local activist who is planning a congressional run: "Josh noticed something out of the corner of his eye,
something moving, and then, before he could notice anything else, he realized he'd hit something, he'd
braked, that something had happened." Josh ends up sentenced to community service, but the accident has
severe emotional repercussions for his parents. Helen, a frustrated painter, slips into a depressive episode
while Hal, a severe clockmaker, moves into his shop and decides to wash his hands of his family. The
trauma extends to the Masters household. David's wife, Meg, a second-grade teacher, attempts to grapple
with her feelings of grief, anger, confusion, and resentment--toward Josh, yes, but also her husband. David
remains alive but comatose. He is visited regularly by the apparition of singer Peggy Lee, who forces David
to examine an old friendship that started him on his career in public service. As five lives attempt to move
past this tragic event, the bonds of love, family, and forgiveness are stretched to their greatest limits. Baker's
(Mail-Order Bride, 2017) prose is crisp and precise, tethered to her characters' emotions in a way that
imbues every scene and observation with meaning: "Their life together had always followed a punctual,
orderly progression. Now the oven clock said 5:20 and the wall clock said 3:05 and then the digital
bedroom clock...just blinked 12:00." The characters are finely drawn, and Baker isn't afraid to spend a lot of
time on the way they process the eruptions in their lives (though, at nearly 400 pages, a little less time
would have been fine). No major revelations or twists are hiding in the bushes. Rather, this is a serious and
engrossing exploration of tragedy and the emotions that come with it. An absorbing and deliberatively
composed tale about reactions to trauma.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Baker, Sara: THE TIMEKEEPER'S SON." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504217468/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=112a3263.
Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A504217468
5/17/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1526578432304 2/3
The Timekeeper's Son
Small Press Bookwatch.
(Sept. 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
The Timekeeper's Son
Sara Baker
Deeds Publishing
https://www.deedspublishing.com
9781944193560, $17.95, PB, www.amazon.com
Synopsis: One night aspiring teenage filmmaker Josh Lovejoy gets high hits a jogger who turns out to be
David Masters, a popular local activist in the small town of Milledge, Georgia. The accident puts Masters in
the hospital in a coma, and shatters the fragile equilibrium of the Lovejoy family.
Josh's father, Hal, a clockmaker who keeps timepieces running with a passion he fails to bring to his
marriage, retreats to his clock shop. Helen Lovejoy, a dedicated mother and amateur painter, falls into a
depression. A shocked Josh reluctantly takes up his court-ordered community service work with disabled
children. Meanwhile, comatose David is visited by the ghost of singer Peggy Lee, while his childless wife,
Meg, an elementary school teacher, tries to imagine her life without him. In her grief, Meg becomes
obsessed with the Lovejoy family.
As the adults around him try to find their footing, Josh indulges in dreams of his future as a famous
filmmaker. In love with an unstable girl and estranged from his parents, Josh follows her to New York City,
where, overwhelmed, he makes a fateful decision that puts him beyond the help of those who love him.
Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights era and the New South, "The Timekeeper's Son" weaves the
lives of these five characters together exposing hidden learning disabilities, broken dreams, complicated
relationships, and communication difficulties.
Critique: Author Sara Baker deftly explores themes of grief and forgiveness, isolation and connection,
masks and disguises, all while depicting its characters' lives with tender intimacy. A superbly crafted novel
that blends elements of a thriller with magical realism, "The Timekeeper's Son" is a unique and memorably
entertaining read from beginning to end. While very highly recommended, especially for community library
Contemporary General Fiction collections, it should be noted for personal reading lists that "The
Timekeeper's Son" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $4.99).
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Timekeeper's Son." Small Press Bookwatch, Sept. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A511454982/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=23d37d53.
Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A511454982
“THE TIMEKEEPER’S SON,” BY SARA BAKER
SEPTEMBER 19, 2017 BY MOLLY HURLEY MORAN LEAVE A COMMENT
Sara Baker
Reviewed by Molly Hurley Moran
Set in the fictional Southern town of Milledge, Georgia, Sara Baker’s luminous novel The Timekeeper’s Son moves beyond the issues and conflicts usually associated with such settings to embrace more universal themes concerning human connection, forgiveness, and grace. The plot revolves around two families who are unknown to each other at the novel’s outset but whose lives become interconnected as the result of a tragic accident.
Meg and David Masters are a liberal couple in late middle age, still driven by the ideals of their youths in the ‘60s and ‘70s. David’s social conscience was formed as a result of growing up in one of the few Jewish families in Milledge and having as his best friend an African-American boy. The racial prejudice he witnessed motivated him to become a lawyer and community activist, working zealously for the marginalized of the town. His wife, Meg, is equally idealistic. She teaches in a Title I elementary school, where she tirelessly helps her students not only with their academic challenges but also with the difficult family situations many of them have. Because of their work, David and Meg are well-known in the town and well-respected by other liberals and by the African-American community.
Helen and Hal Lovejoy are a more reclusive couple. Hal’s life revolves around his job of repairing old clocks. He has a small, old-fashioned-looking shop, with just one or two employees and not many customers. Helen is a semi-retired nurse. She devotes most of her time to homemaking and to mothering their sensitive son, Josh. An academically struggling high school junior, Josh finds refuge in drama club and amateur film-making. The quiet of the Lovejoys’ life and the idealism of the Masters’ life are rocked when the car Josh is driving home from a film rehearsal late one night accidentally hits David Masters, out for a moonlight jog, sending him into a prolonged coma and altering the course of the characters’ lives in ways that will bring anguish but also, ultimately, grace.
The novel is engaging on a number of levels. The plot alone keeps the reader riveted: Will David survive? And if so, will he ever come out of the coma that has thrust his wife’s life into limbo and left the town’s downtrodden without a champion? If he doesn’t, will Josh be charged with manslaughter? And will the fact that Josh, who is basically a good kid, had succumbed to peer pressure and smoked a few puffs of marijuana the night of the accident result in a harsher sentence? Will this one mistake in judgment thereby ruin his future and thwart his dream of making something of his life by becoming a film-maker, as well as destroy his parents’ marriage, already fraying from their conflicting views of how to handle their son?
But more than its gripping plot, it is the novel’s exploration of character that holds the reader. Ms. Baker narrates The Timekeeper’s Son in a series of vignettes, moving deftly among the points of view of the main characters. In precise, often lyrical prose, she renders their inner lives, particularly the private dreams and disappointments they harbor.
Hal, for example, has since childhood been fascinated with old clocks and with the history of timekeeping. He loves the solitary absorption of his work, tinkering with the innards of clocks all day in his shop: “Was there anything more comforting than the ticking of a clock, the slow majestic ringing of the hours? The sense of order imposed on the day as it unfurled? Let the rest of the world have their clock radios, their cheap plastic digital watches. Here in this shop, there would be order, the stately progression of hours marked properly by the singular tickings and strikings, each one as identifiable as birdsong.” But he is haunted by a sense of failure, because a learning disability prevented him from completing his degree in mechanical engineering and hence making a name for himself in the field of horology. Seeing his son, whom he loves dearly, suffering from the same learning difficulty, Hal pushes him to try harder in school so that Josh won’t end up with similar regrets. This pushing, however, is interpreted by Helen as hardness on Hal’s part and by Josh as his father’s scorn for and disappointment in him.
Helen too has a complex inner life that she withholds from others. In her youth she was an aspiring artist but gave up painting when Josh was born. Recently, she has begun painting again secretly, while Hal is at work and Josh at school. She alternates between blissful hours of absorption—“She felt alive, every fiber of her being concentrated on this moment, this sketch”—and sudden onslaughts of discouragement when she sees her work as cramped and amateurish. “Neither Josh nor Hal had any idea of her passionate agony; when they came home, dinner was always ready, and she was there, listening to the stories of their days, as if she happily had no other function.”
Josh’s passion is film-making, the one thing he feels he is good at, the one thing that allows him to escape from the crushing sense of failure he feels in the classroom and in his father’s presence. Like Hal with his clocks and Helen with her painting, Josh becomes completely absorbed when he is working on a film or looking at the world with the eyes of a film-maker. Walking to school one morning after a tension-filled breakfast with his dad, Josh senses his spirits lifting as he notices “the patterns of light and dark [that] made the suburban street seem mysterious and inviting. A cat slinked by, and Josh framed it in his imaginary camera, one of those throwaway shots he loved so much in Chaplin’s films.” He yearns to tell his dad about such moments but then stops himself: “Ha! It would just irritate him.”
Although Meg and David have more open communication in their marriage (that is, until his accident) than do Helen and Hal, Meg bears a secret grief: that she never had children. In the early years they tried to conceive but ran into problems with infertility. Meg wanted to adopt, but David was adamantly opposed and she eventually conceded. However, her yearning slumbers inside her, rearing its head at unexpected moments. For instance, at Josh’s trial after the accident—for DUI marijuana, reckless driving, endangerment, and speeding charges—Meg observes the boy “glancing anxiously at his mother, who gave him a slight nod, a ghost of a smile. Meg could imagine the nods and smiles she might have given him all along—his first drawings, his first ride on a two-wheeler, his first crush. . . . A mother and son. The old pang came back to her, the persistent haunting emptiness . . .”
Most of the time, however, Meg is able to fill this emptiness with her attachment to the children she teaches. As Ms. Baker does with Hal’s deep interest in horology, Helen’s in painting, and Josh’s in film-making, she renders palpably the excitement Meg feels about her teaching: “Meg usually got to school early. She liked the quiet of the classroom before the storm of kids hit, liked to putter and straighten, bringing in some new item to share with them—a feather or shell or cicada skin or perfect transparent casting of the insect with all its parts. . . . She anticipated her students in their essences, free of the green snotty noses, the red-rimmed eyes, their fidgeting inattention. She sat in stillness, the weak sun coming in the grimy window, the coffee warm in her hand, and she was filled with love.”
In rendering David’s inner life the author is faced with a challenge since this character is in a coma throughout most of the novel. Nonetheless, Ms. Baker presents a convincing portrait of a mind that is in this state. Although he appears to others to be totally unconscious, David drifts in and out of a blurry consciousness, at times sensing the presence and the essence of Meg—“He could feel it now, her emotional weariness. She felt everything deeply, couldn’t leave things behind, so that when she came, it felt to him as if a whole roomful of people were there—the children she taught, her friends, the cashier she knew from Bell’s”—and then blanking out or drifting into a surreal dream in which he confuses Meg with the singer Peggy Lee, whose albums he’d spent hours listening to as a boy. The singer’s soulful, sympathetic presence triggers sustained flashbacks in which David relives the painful episodes of his youth that formed his sharp awareness of social and racial injustice.
One effect of the roving points of view approach that Ms. Baker employs to narrate the novel is an emphasis on the gulfs between characters. We see that they often feel misunderstood by those closest to them and often misinterpret the motives of those others. The characters, then, seem to be essentially alone, emotionally cut off. However, in the course of the novel, as they struggle with the chaos the tragic accident has wrought in their lives, the characters begin to grow and to break out of their emotional isolation. For instance, Josh at first balks at the after-school community service work the court requires him to do, feeling appalled at the sight of the severely handicapped children he will be expected to clean and assist at the Good Shepherd Home for Special Needs Children. But he gradually discovers he has a talent for working with such kids and forges a special bond with one particular little boy, whose utterance “I your friend” at a moment when Josh is feeling particularly low causes Josh’s spirits to soar.
Other characters are similarly helped by such unlikely friendships. For example, Meg, upon learning that the boy who ran into David had been smoking pot, is furious and forms an immediate prejudice against the boy’s family, imagining “a slovenly, neglectful mother, someone who smoked and racked up debt buying shoddy goods on the shopping channel. The father watched NASCAR and drank beer and didn’t bother to vote. The boy had been brought up on video games and fast food, was a troublemaker, a druggie, a punk.” But after seeing the three of them at the trial, she begins to revise this view and over time her stereotyping gives way to sympathy and understanding. She eventually forms a friendship with Hal and through her counseling, Hal becomes more sensitive to his son’s needs. And Helen forms a friendship with the teacher of an art course she enrolls in who ultimately helps her to see how she has closed herself off from Hal and hardened into a rigid way of regarding him. With this insight, she begins to find her way back to the closeness they had had in the early years of their marriage.
The characters’ trajectories, then, are from isolation to friendship and bonding—the classic arc of comedy, in the tradition of the great nineteenth-century novels of manners and morals. Although The Timekeeper’s Son does not end with all the characters’ problems neatly resolved, it does end with a quiet celebration of the transformative power of forgiveness and human connection.
DANIEL JAMES SUNDAHL, DEEDS PUBLISHING, SARA BAKER, THE TIMEKEEPER'S SON
Daniel James Sundahl Reviews Sara Baker’s “The Timekeeper’s Son”
In Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, Creative Writing, Fiction, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Novels on December 13, 2017 at 6:45 am
Daniel James Sundahl is Emeritus Professor in American Studies and English at Hillsdale College where he taught for over 32 years. Prior to retirement, he was Kirk Distinguished Professor in American Studies. He’s relocated from Michigan to South Carolina.
These days one can enroll in creative writing programs with coursework or workshops in narrative medicine, poetic medicine, expressive writing and even medical humanities.
It’s an interesting notion likely connected to “coming of age” stories, “family dynamics” stories, all to be told with within expansive and insightful narratives which apply to all fields of “work” and of course what it means to be human with an examined life. Storytellers, after all, are interpreters in professional and cultural environments.
What would be the point?
Narrative as healthcare can be the point especially since stories help build empathy, mindfulness, and are diagnostic tools. Imagine for a moment a healthcare professional addressing an illness. How quick and easy to venture into remote hypotheticals. How better to address the illness through narrative, the interior experience of deep inquiry, confronting the illness as a story.
I mention this since it seems the way to address a review of Sara Baker’s The Timekeeper’s Son, a novel which asks the reader to recognize, absorb, interpret, and bear witness to a young man’s “difference” and his family’s dysfunction.
Why?
It can be used to explain motivation, even what organizes a novel’s plot or narrative development.
Here’s some context. I once sat with a student attempting something basic—how to use a dictionary. It was fundamental, alphabet, phonetics, and a dictionary entry. I gave the young man a word and then handed him the dictionary with the simple request: Look for the word which I had just sounded out.
He was flummoxed and looked at me and said, sweetly, “I don’t know how to use the air conditioner.” The issue was severe dyslexia.
There’s a kinship between this small narrative and Sara Baker’s novel: In a Georgia small town, Josh Lovejoy, whose aspiration in life is to become a filmmaker, drives home late at night uncharacteristically “high.” Accidentally he hits a jogger, David Masters, placing him in a coma. In all likelihood, Josh owns some hidden disabilities, living as he also does in a fragile household.
The incident is shattering, more so because Josh is already estranged from his father, who sees little value in Josh’s aspirations. The consequence of living with a “distant” father is Josh’s loneliness and lack of self-worth.
He’s adrift at an important moment in his life and culpable for the accident. He takes up his court-ordered community service while waiting to see if his culpability will change when and if David Masters dies. Josh works at the Good Shepherd School for Disabled Children.
Baker places the reader, then, in the heart and soul of a troubled young man; the plot, however, is diagnostic, addressing not only the Josh’s “troubles” but the delicate equilibrium of his family and the Masterses’ family.
It’s a “case study,” in other words; Josh’s father is a clockmaker whose sense of things is more devoted to the timepieces he keeps running but with the same disinterestedness he brings to his family life. His “shop” is the place to which he retreats. Josh’s mother, on the other hand, is equally preoccupied if not depressive.
In the novel’s time, then, as those hidden disabilities and wounds emerge against the background of the claims and limits of community, Josh faces a certain kind of annihilation which would include the “good” that’s in his heart.