cover image Time on My Hands: A Novel with Photographs

Time on My Hands: A Novel with Photographs

Peter Delacorte. Scribner Book Company, $23 (400pp) ISBN 978-0-684-82651-6

In this enchantingly imaginative third novel (after Levantine and Games of Chance), Delacorte employs the popular premise of time travel in a nimble tale of suspense and romance. On assignment in Paris in 1994, travel writer Gabriel Prince meets an eccentric physicist who has stumbled onto a time machine. Obsessed with the notion that the Reagan administration has had a disastrous effect on the course of history, the utopian scientist persuades Gabriel to travel back to prewar Hollywood during Reagan's early years and alter the career of Bonzo's co-star so that he will never become the 39th president. As incentive, the physicist arms Gabriel with a laptop loaded with archived racetrack results and stock-market histories. Arriving in Malibu colony in 1938, Gabriel immediately falls in love with a starlet whom he knows is fated to die within days. Playing the ponies, he attains instant wealth; lifting plots from future hits, he also becomes an overnight screenwriting sensation. Just when things are looking up, a pair of thugs from the 22nd century show up to reclaim the time machine, and Gabriel must flee back to the future. Faulty circuitry, petty jealousies, unscrupulous studio executives and the fickle finger of fate give Gabriel more than he has bargained for. Delacorte's prose is agile and brisk. Narrator Gabriel is a fluid and ironic observer, not only of Hollywood flim-flam but also of his own boondoggled attempt to change history. Photographs of scenes in the novel add a paradoxical sense of reality to the fantastical plot. (June)