From the intimacy of small town America to big city life, from World War II to 9/11, In the Meantime vividly encapsulates an unforgettable era.
On a hot summer's day in 1931, three five-year-olds meet on a dusty street in a small Midwestern town, beginning a friendship that will last all their lives. Kathryn, the oldest in an ever-expanding family, is bright and earnest, and thinks she wants to become a nurse. Starling is an only child with an absent father. He doesn't yet know that he is of mixed race-he doesn't even know what that means-all he knows is that when he grows up he will be a star. Luke doesn't know what he wants, except for his older brother not to be dead.
Together they experience the joys and pains of childhood, although the anxieties of puberty and awakening sexuality nearly destroy their three-way friendship forever. Reaching adulthood after World War II, they follow their dreams to New York City, where they discover that not even Manhattan is free of racism and prejudice.
Through the years of their ever-entwined adult lives some dreams are realized while others grow dim, but one constant remains: their bond of friendship. At the book's end, some seventy years after it began, only one of them remains to tell the story of their lives, and of what happened…in the meantime.
About the Author
 ROBIN LIPPINCOTT is the author of two previous novels and
a collection of short stories. His work has also appeared in The Paris Review, Fence, The New York Times Book Review, The Literary Review, and many other journals, as well as several anthologies, and he has been awarded fellowships to Yaddo and
The MacDowell Colony. He teaches in the MFA Writing Program at Spalding University and at
Harvard University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
|
Listen to the author as he reads an extract from In the Meantime!
The Critics Praise:
“Lippincott has a particular knack for the shorthand
dialogue that develops between people
who have been together for a long time, and he
portrays the complicated bonds between friends
and lovers without sentimentalizing them…delivers
many…tenderly molded flashes of truth.”
The New York Times
|
