Books: April 16, 1997
Back to the Future
In his third novel, Peter Delacorte '67 tackles love, loss, and Ronald Reagan
Time on My Hands:
A Novel with Photographs
Peter Delacorte '67
Scribner, $23
Time travel is a confusing business, especially when the time machine's control panel is acting up. It's also risky, particularly when the machine isn't yours, and two angry young Frenchmen from the 22nd century are following you through time, threatening to break your neck unless you return their machine. And it can be humbling if you're a 1974 Princeton graduate and you find yourself in 1938, where no one believes you went to Princeton, much less wrote your senior thesis on Henry James's Turn of the Screw, because there are no records of you. The indignity!
Such are the trials of Gabriel Prince, but that's not all. Mix in romance, political intrigue, and film criticism; stir them together for 397 pages; add photographs, and voila! You have Time on My Hands, the third novel by Peter Delacorte '67 (his previous works are Games of Chance and Levantine).
Gabriel Prince writes travel guides for a living. He stumbles across the time machine at the Musée National des Techniques in Paris, where he's updating his guidebook and despondently mulling over the duplicity of a woman he loved and lost (you know the type). In the course of his research, he meets Jasper Hudnut, an eccentric scientist with a profound hatred of Ronald Reagan.
Jasper, who's a charming and persuasive kind of guy, but too old for the rigors of time travel, convinces Gabriel to go back in time to 1941 and save the world. How? Well, by ensuring that Reagan never becomes president, of course. Gabriel, after a little arm twisting and a few trial runs, becomes intoxicated with the rush of time travel, brushes up on Reagan's movies, and he's off. He lands in 1938, then prevaricates his way to the status of houseguest at the Hudnut family's Malibu home, which he shares with their cousin, Lorna Fairchild. Lorna is a beautiful young actress who helps him get a job writing scripts for Warner Brothers. He quickly makes an impression with his avant-garde ideas, which he borrows liberally from movie masterpieces of the future.
It's here that the book becomes especially playful for readers interested in Hollywood history. In addition to befriending the earnest, young Ronald ("Dutch") Reagan, Gabriel meets many of the other players of the time. But, of course, Gabriel can't just lounge around writing movies like Four O'Clock (a prewrite of High Noon), getting rich and famous, enjoying the unpolluted Southern California air and the absence of Taco Bells on every corner. No, he's there for a purpose: to steer Reagan off course. While he's trying to figure out how to do this, he winds up steering himself off course by falling in love with Lorna.
As tends to be the case with true love, there are obstacles. One is Lorna's boozy boyfriend and the other is the unfortunate fact that Gabriel knows she dies in a car accident in 1938. But he saves her life by not letting her drive, and seduces her (his '90s-style sensitive man goes a long way in 1938; he even cooks).
Along the way, he inadvertently causes Reagan's death by drowning, and, as if that wasn't bad enough, he loses the girl. This wasn't exactly what he had in mind, so he goes back to 1994 to confer with Jasper, but winds up in 1984, where, sans Reagan, the world is a far, far better place, in which nuclear weapons have all but been abolished and there's a tranquility in the air (marred only by the angry Frenchmen who want their time machine back). He finds Jasper and asks his permission to go back to 1938, resurrect Reagan, and win Lorna again. The happy, peaceful, 1984 version of Jasper says it's fine with him, and Gabriel's off to the past again.
Confusing? Upon landing in 1938, Gabriel sees Lorna, "the woman I loved, the woman I had lost and feared I would never see again, the woman who forty-one hours ago had told me to get out of her life, the woman who several minutes ago had been dead for forty-six years." Gabriel decides this time around to write a script for Reagan that is so good that he'll become a major movie star-major enough to stay where he belongs, without venturing into politics.
Does Reagan become a major movie star? Do Lorna and Gabriel live happily ever after? Is the world saved? I could tell you, but then you wouldn't read the book.
Despite the significance of his name, which is reinforced by references to Gabriel as an angel, it's difficult to believe in Gabriel as a force for good or a messenger of any remotely holy message, due to the time period Delacorte chose. The fact that Gabriel attempts to save the world by eliminating Reagan's influence, while humorous, seems inconsequential in the context of World War II.
Delacorte addresses this concern superficially when Gabriel reasons, "Pearl Harbor was just over two years away. Auschwitz had already been conceived, was perhaps even under construction, as we lay in bed. I would always tell myself that I was not here to attend to those things. But . . . Was it possible that I . . . had been given access to the machine to save the world from . . . atrocities? The conclusion I invariably reached . . . was that these were wheels set in motion either so long ago or simply so inexorably that they could not be stopped."
That aside-and there are certainly readers who won't be able to set it aside-Time on My Hands is an entertaining, slightly mind-bending read.
-Andrea Gollin '88
Andrea Gollin works as a journalist and a webzine editor. She lives in Miami.
Smart Talk from a Basketball Wizard
The Smart Take From the Strong
Pete Carril with Dan White '65
Simon and Schuster, $21
I confess that when I heard about Pete Carril's new book, The Smart Take From the Strong, I cringed, thinking that Carril, for all his talk about love for the game, and his railing against both on- and off-court greed, would be so quick to use celebrity to turn a quick buck. I was more than a little pleased to find that I was wrong.
The Smart Take From the Strong is simply a good book about basketball. If you hope to find a philosophy of life you may or may not be disappointed, depending on how well you can apply statements like, "Praise is the cheapest form of reward" to your particular situation. If you buy it hoping to learn how to throw a good backdoor pass (". . . aim the pass for the rear end of the defender so that when he turns or opens to the ball . . . it's too late") you'll get your money's worth.
The book was written with the help of Dan White '65, director of the Alumni Council, and reads more like an "as told to" work than a collaboration. It's conversational in tone. Much of it reportedly grew out of office bull sessions with new head coach Bill Carmody and former Carril assistants Joe Scott '87 and John Thompson III '88.
Carril's "basketball philosophy" rises from a tangle of anecdotes, Carrilian aphorisms, and mini-lectures, giving the reader a sense of the man and an idea of why he coached the way he did, but not giving an organized approach to the game. For instance, you get a healthy dose of Carril's recruiting philosophy: "The shrewd coach rarely recruits players from schools whose names include the words 'country,' 'day,' or 'friends,' and don't forget 'ecole.' Players who are products of the kind of affluence those names suggest are never tough enough when the game is on the line."
Longtime Princeton basketball fans will enjoy the book for its anecdotes about players on past teams, for Carril's observations on the Princeton-Penn series, and for the coach's love for the "cerebral" aspects of the game, which he makes apparent on almost every page. Basketball cognoscenti will enjoy it for illuminating comments on technical aspects of the game. They will also appreciate Carril's defense of the ballcontrol offense he employed in his last years at Princeton. Carril will be unjustly remembered as the grandfather of "slowdown" basketball, a strategy he insists evolved out of necessity: "When I first came to Princeton, we had fast teams and averaged close to 80 points a game-I like to remind people who criticized us recently for playing a deliberate kind of offense, or a slowdown game, of that little bit of history. Our later offense wasn't slow, it was judicious. As the players got slower afoot here, they dictated to me that it was time to change our style of play."
Throughout the book, Carril makes it clear that in his time at Princeton he was nothing so much as an opportunist, who took advantage of what he had in terms of talent, speed, and size, and used it to remarkable effect in the pursuit of what he calls "the only objective standard: winning."
-Rob Garver
Rob Garver has covered Princeton basketball for Princeton's Town Topics newspaper and PAW.
On the Night Shelf: What Professors are Reading
Leisure time is a scarce commodity for most professors; still, a few manage to curl up with a good book when they have the chance. We asked several to divulge what they currently are reading when the moment allows.
Soho Machida, associate professor of East Asian Studies, offered this list of his leisure readings: A Quiet Life (Grove Press, 1996, $22), a novel by Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel laureate in Literature who is on campus this year as a visiting lecturer in East Asian Studies and a fellow of the Humanities Council (see page 7); The Beginning of Heaven and Earth: The Sacred Book of Japan's Hidden Christians (University of Hawaii Press, 1996, $16.95) translated by Christal Whelan; and Entry into the Inconceivable: An Introduction of Hua-Yen Buddhism (University of Hawaii Press, 1983, $13), by Thomas Cleary. He also reports that he faithfully reads The New York Times Magazine.
Anthropology Professor Lawrence Rosen has three categories of books he reads in his spare time. One relates to his sailing hobby and is strictly for pleasure; under this heading comes My Old Man and the Sea (HarperCollins, 1996, $12), a novel by David and Daniel Hays, and the historical novel Longitude (Penguin Books, 1996, $10.95), by Dava Sobel, the story of the scientific contest and challenge that resulted in the discovery of longitude. Another heading includes background reading that helps him prepare for courses. This includes Forbidden Relatives: The American Myth of Cousin Marriage (University of Illinois Press, 1996, $29.95), by Martin Ottenheimer, and Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 1996, $19.95) by Will Kymlicka. Finally, having grown up at the tail end of the radio age, he enjoys listening to books on tape. Currently in his Walkman is Murther and Walking Spirits by Robertson Davies (Recorded Books, 1991, $89). He encourages students to check out books on tape, available at the public library, as a way to unwind from their eye-straining course reading.
David Billington '50, professor of civil engineering, uses his leisure reading to branch out a bit from the Engineering Quadrangle. Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996, $17), by Jack N. Rakove, is a detailed narrative of the making of the Constitution, giving insight into the founding fathers' contemporary thoughts and focusing especially on James Madison 1771. John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940), by Allen Nevins, is a critical biography of one of America's wealthiest men. Other, more scientific volumes include The Introspective Engineer (St. Martin's Press, 1995, $13.95), by Samuel Florman, a series of essays by a practicing engineer who reflects on the pleasures and problems of his profession. Finally, Building the Ultimate Dam: John S. Eastwood and the Control of Water in the West (University of Kansas Press, 1995, $45), by Donald Jackson, is a history of American dam building that focuses on one engineer whose style differed from that of traditional engineers who produced massive, costly designs. "All of these books relate to my present scholarly activities," Billington says.
"On those rare, rare occasions" when he has a free moment, Sociology Professor Howard Taylor can be found reading Calvin Trillin's Remembering Denny (Warner Books, 1994, $9.99), a biography of Trillin's friend who struggled with image and identity as a closeted gay male at Yale and in his later career as an academic; N. J. MacKintosh's Cyril Burt: Fraud or Framed? (Oxford University Press, 1995, $24.95), the story of an academic scandal in which a British psychologist allegedly faked data; and Ellis Cose's The Rage of a Privileged Class (Harper Perennial, 1995, $13).
Luiza Moreira, associate professor of Romance languages and literatures, says Steven Saylor's series Mysteries of Ancient Rome (Ivy Books, $5.99) is the latest thing she's been reading for fun, "if I have some spare time." The series includes the titles Roman Blood, Arms of Nemesis, and Catalina's Riddle.
Philosophy Professor Margaret Wilson also enjoys reading mystery novels in her spare time. She has read several of Ruth Rendell's books, and will soon start The Bridesmaid (Thorndike Press, 1990, $13). She also has been doing some reading for her Philosophy 353 course on animals, which includes Diane Ackerman's The Moon by Whale Light (Random House, 1991, $11), a collection of nature writing featuring articles on whales, bats, penguins, and crocodiles. And, she recently bought Professor of Comparative Literature Robert Fagels's new translation of Homer:The Odyssey (Viking, 1997, $35), which is "quite popular around here."