Abolishing Time (Memoirs of a Deranged Reader)

An impassioned case for the life-altering, time-bending power of literature, explored through the relationships, travels, and formative works that shaped a young writer.

Harold Rogers, a young novelist and boxing coach in New York City, spends his days sparring with the gnawing questions around fiction’s true meaning and powers. There’s the broccoli school of thought: fiction is world-expandingly edifying; read novels to BE a better person! But how do you explain scoundrels like Faulkner or Steinbeck? Or the constellations of illiterate saints who have dazzled us since the beginning of time?

Entertainment can’t be the answer; the arc of progress bends toward perfect entertainment; why read Virginia Woolf when you can tie off for Mommy Algorithm to inject dopamine directly into your brain? . . . Or do we read fiction to wrestle that burly unpinnable question: WHAT IS LIFE?

Abolishing Time follows Harold’s search for answers in the people, books, and obsessions that have shaped his life. Beginning with his grandmother's funeral in Steubenville, Ohio, and ending with the spreading of his grandfather’s ashes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the book is haunted by the finitude of our lives and the impossible desire to abolish time. Between these memorials, Harold romps across Europe with his longtime girlfriend, takes stock of his adolescent devotion to David Foster Wallace, chases down the legacy of a forgotten Brazilian writer, and reckons with the consequences of living a life devoted to reading and writing.

Comic and deeply personal, Abolishing Time ventures into the borderless territory between criticism and storytelling to unearth the answers to these all-consuming literary and existential questions: How should we live when we know everybody is going to die?