“If H. G. Wells had been funny & Oscar Wilde obsessed with time travel they might have mated & produced Bob Smith, who has written the funniest & wildest ride imaginable through the recent past & near future.”
Edmund White
“It’s safe to say your relationship is in trouble if the only way you can imagine solving your problems is by borrowing a time machine.”
How much of my life has been lived with the nagging: “What if”? I have a frequent inner-dialogue filled with “if I could go back & do it again, I would…”
Simply one of the best books I have read in a very long time Bob Smith’s Remembrances Of Things is filled with the full sweep of life’s experiences: love, lust, loggerheads, lenity, levity, lampooning, loathsome evils & legitimate indignation, yet the book is perfectly balanced storytelling from witty start to moving finish.
In 2006, comic book dealer John Sherkston decides to break up with his physicist boyfriend, Taylor. Taylor announces he’s finally perfected a time machine for the government. John is sent back to 1986, where he finds “Junior,” his younger, more innocent self. When Junior starts to flirt, John wonders how to reveal his identity:“I’m you, only with less hair & problems you can’t imagine.” He also meets up with the younger Taylor, & the unlikely trio teams up to plot a course around their future relationship missteps & problems, prevent John’s sister from making a calamitous choice, & stop George W Bush from becoming the president.
It is a cosmic, comic, cross-country, time-bending course, where John confronts our country’s blunders & his own mistakes with the lesson that a second chance at changing things for the better also brings new chances to fuck it all up.
Edgy & droll, Remembrance Of Things I Forgot ponders dying romance, relationships’ dysfunctions, suicide, NYC, California & recent American history with a smart mix of sly comedy, science fiction, political satire, social scrutiny. The Smith zingers had me laughing out loud on the MAX train. I was so in love with the characters that I forced myself to slow down my reading because I didn’t want the book to end. Buy this book.
Edmund White
How much of my life has been lived with the nagging: “What if”? I have a frequent inner-dialogue filled with “if I could go back & do it again, I would…”
Simply one of the best books I have read in a very long time Bob Smith’s Remembrances Of Things is filled with the full sweep of life’s experiences: love, lust, loggerheads, lenity, levity, lampooning, loathsome evils & legitimate indignation, yet the book is perfectly balanced storytelling from witty start to moving finish.
In 2006, comic book dealer John Sherkston decides to break up with his physicist boyfriend, Taylor. Taylor announces he’s finally perfected a time machine for the government. John is sent back to 1986, where he finds “Junior,” his younger, more innocent self. When Junior starts to flirt, John wonders how to reveal his identity:“I’m you, only with less hair & problems you can’t imagine.” He also meets up with the younger Taylor, & the unlikely trio teams up to plot a course around their future relationship missteps & problems, prevent John’s sister from making a calamitous choice, & stop George W Bush from becoming the president.
It is a cosmic, comic, cross-country, time-bending course, where John confronts our country’s blunders & his own mistakes with the lesson that a second chance at changing things for the better also brings new chances to fuck it all up.
Edgy & droll, Remembrance Of Things I Forgot ponders dying romance, relationships’ dysfunctions, suicide, NYC, California & recent American history with a smart mix of sly comedy, science fiction, political satire, social scrutiny. The Smith zingers had me laughing out loud on the MAX train. I was so in love with the characters that I forced myself to slow down my reading because I didn’t want the book to end. Buy this book.
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