A Time Outside This Time
A novel
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A blistering novel about a writer’s creative response to the daily onslaught of fake news, memory, and the ways in which truth gives over to fiction
“An absorbing portrait of an inspired artist in the midst of our maddening cultural moment” —Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies
When Satya, a professor and author, attends a prestigious artists' retreat to write, he finds the pressures of the outside world won’t let up: the president rages online; a dangerous virus envelops the globe; and the twenty-four-hour news cycle throws fuel on every fire. For most of the retreat fellows, such stories are unbearable distractions, but for Satya, who sees them play out in both America and his native India, these Orwellian interruptions begin to crystallize into an idea for his new novel, Enemies of the People, about the lies we tell ourselves and one another. Satya scours his life for instances in which truth bends toward the imagined and misinformation is mistaken as fact.
Mixing Satya’s experiences—as a father, husband, and American immigrant—with newspaper clippings, the president’s tweets, and observations on famous works of art, A Time Outside This Time captures a feverish political moment with intelligence, beauty, and an eye for the uncanny. It is a brilliant interrogation on life in a post-truth era and an attempt to imagine a time outside this one.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kumar (Immigrant, Montana) delivers a mostly engaging polemic about the role of fiction in a post-truth world. As Indian American novelist-journalist Satya works on a novel about fake news at a residency on an Italian island in early 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic (along with feverish rumors and fabrications) begins to spread across the globe. The novel will be about "models of social acceptance," as Satya drily narrates. Satya turns to obvious sources for guidance and material: George Orwell's 1984 and Donald Trump's tweets. While still on the island and later at home with his family in Maryland, he records boyhood memories from India, muses on the slippery relationship between journalist and subject, compiles news clippings, tells the story of a police raid on an Indian guerilla leader, reflects on police brutality and mob violence, and writes flash fictions. Scattered throughout are engaging summaries of psychological experiments—of varying validity—which are supplied to him by his wife, Vaani, a psychologist studying alpha male rhesus macaques. There are some moments of grandiosity ("What can one write to save a life?"), but it sizzles when it gets to Satya's attempts to deploy, or resist, the "seductive language" and "hectic plots" of fiction amid pervasive mistruths. Overall, this experiment pays off.
