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Meantime: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Katharine Noel (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 24 ratings
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From the award-winning author of Halfway House: a “heartfelt and heartbreaking story” of a woman whose life unravels while her husband is hospitalized (Library Journal).
 
Claire Hood has never had a typical family. When she was nine, her father fell in love with a married woman, and the two households agreed to live under one roof. Nicknamed “the Naked Family,” they were infamous in the community for their eccentric, free-spirited lifestyle. Now, in their thirties, her stepsister Nicole is planning to having a baby on her own, and Claire’s husband, Jeremy, longs to start a family as well. But Claire wants to avoid an ordinary existence at all costs.
 
When Jeremy becomes seriously ill, his high school sweetheart, Gita, is a bit too eager to lend a hand in his recovery. As Claire’s suspicion of their relationship grows, she feels increasingly estranged from her own life. Faced with Nicole’s impending motherhood and Jeremy’s increasing closeness with his ex, Claire must resolve lingering childhood hang-ups and decide what she’s willing to sacrifice for independence.
 
“An unflinching autopsy of the heart, laying bare the raw emotions that push us to reconfigure, again and again, our senses of family.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
“Noel beautifully captures the difficulties and insecurities that make up marriage, sisterhood, and how our upbringing bleeds into our adulthood . . . showing how family can both bring us together and tear us apart.” —Library Journal
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  1. Print length
    240 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Black Cat
  5. Publication date
    November 1, 2016
  6. File size
    3516 KB
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
    Enabled
  9. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
  10. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Meantime

“Noel’s second perceptive, character-driven novel delves into multiple relationships and how they ebb and flow over the years . . . Noel writes with empathy and precision about the minutiae of the lives of her characters, drawing her readers immediately into their interwoven stories.” —Booklist

“An unflinching autopsy of the heart, laying bare the raw emotions that push us to reconfigure, again and again, our senses of family.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Noel beautifully captures the difficulties and insecurities that make up marriage, sisterhood, and how our upbringing bleeds into our adulthood. Doubt and rediscovery abound in this heartfelt and heartbreaking story, showing how family can both bring us together and tear us apart.” —Library Journal

“Katharine Noel’s characters display the kind of rare authenticity that makes you certain that you’ve met them in real life. Meantime is a shrewd and funny novel about the fragile lines that divide vulnerability from self-protection, loyalty from betrayal, and about the tiny choices that can make or unmake a friendship, a marriage, a family.” —Carolyn Parkhurst, author of Harmony and the New York Times bestseller The Dogs of Babel

“I’m always looking for (and hardly ever finding) a book to lure me in, keep me from cleaning out the pantry, paying bills, writing to my aunt. But Meantime is exactly this. Katharine Noel brings onto the page characters so vibrant you almost want to step out of their way as they stumble through their sorrows, armed only with gallows humor. Noel understands a fundamental truth: that in fiction as in life, tragedy can brake for comedy, but comedy brakes for nothing.” —Carol Anshaw, author of the New York Times bestseller Carry the One

“Noel is an expert at creating scenes and characters that feel undeniably real. In Meantime I was fully invested in the complex, funny, and unpredictable character Claire Hood—her strange history, devastating present, and uncertain future. This is a novel with edge and heart, and I loved every exquisite sentence.” —Kaui Hart Hemmings, author of How to Party With an Infant and the New York Times bestseller The Descendants

About the Author

Katharine Noel currently teaches at the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She has been the Writer in Residence at Claremont McKenna College and the Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where she held Wallace Stegner and Truman Capote fellowships. Noel’s first novel, Halfway House, was a New York Times Editors' Choice and winner of a Ken/NAMI Award for "outstanding literary contributions to a better understanding of mental illness," and the 2006 Kate Chopin prize for fiction. She lives with her husband, the writer Eric Puchner, and their children in Baltimore, Maryland.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01MPXARXN
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Black Cat (November 1, 2016)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 1, 2016
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 3516 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 24 ratings

About the author

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Katharine Noel

Katharine Noel

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Katharine Noel’s first novel, Halfway House, was a New York Times Editors' Choice and winner of a Ken/NAMI Award for "outstanding literary contributions to a better understanding of mental illness," and the 2006 Kate Chopin prize for fiction. She has been the Writer in Residence at Claremont McKenna College and the Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where she held Wallace Stegner and Truman Capote fellowships. Katharine lives with her husband, the writer Eric Puchner, and their children in Baltimore, Maryland, where she teaches at Johns Hopkins University.

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
24 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Alyssa Marie
4.0 out of 5 stars A Complex Introspective Journey
Reviewed in the United States on June 15, 2017
*I received a free copy of this book from the publisher at BEA 2016. This is an honest review.*

This is an interesting book that deals with the simple realities of life, especially focusing on relationships and how they define a person. This book focuses on Claire, who had an interesting childhood growing up, but that is simply a backdrop to the main story of Claire’s faltering relationship with her husband, which affects everything she does within the main storyline. As her relationship because more distant, she is increasingly aware of just how much of her life revolves around her husband and the life that they made together and she’s faced with the same choice her parents had to make when she was a child: does she rip it apart and start fresh, or does she try to live with the changing reality?

Aside from a few main plot points, like Claire’s husband Jeremy being hospitalized, and Claire’s sister getting pregnant, not a whole lot really happens in this book. It’s mostly an introspective journey that the reader takes with Claire, who is forced to re-examine everything about her life. I enjoyed it for its gritty reality in showing how relationships often work. Neither Claire nor Jeremy are perfect people; nobody is ever perfectly right, and they both commit wrongs on each other. Claire isn’t the sainted wife dutifully taking care of her husband in ICU, she is certainly doing that, but it takes its toll on her and she and Jeremy both end up a little snippy with each other because of how exhausted and miserable they both are. My favorite scene is one where Claire is reaching her breaking point with Jeremy and his new closeness with his ex, so she sets a trap for him. No, it’s not mature, but I don’t know any adult who would be perfectly mature in her situation, so I appreciated it for its reality.

Mainly, I appreciated this novel for its ability to allow me to reflect on my own life and my own concepts about relationships and what I find important in them. This was a hard, sad story, but it contains ideas that everyone can appreciate, even if they don’t agree with the character’s choices or reactions. If you’re looking for a more reflective sort of story that explores what relationships (including friendships and family relationships) entail and how they evolve, then definitely give this a try.
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Seven In One
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written
Reviewed in the United States on October 16, 2016
Verified Purchase
Moving and insightful, this book vividly captures the complexities of both marriage and sisterhood. I loved Katharine Noel's first book, Halfway House, and couldn't wait to read her second novel. The central character, Claire Hood, is especially beautifully written and there's realism and humor in the relationship with her sister that I've rarely seen captured in fiction. I couldn't put it down.
3 people found this helpful
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Adam R. Garman
3.0 out of 5 stars Decent Half-Engaging, Half-Disinteresting Fiction
Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2017
I read halfway through Katharine Noel's Meantime before skimming to the end.

The first half was engaging. I enjoyed how the characters unfolded chapter by chapter. The plot was slow, but not sluggish.

After the injury, however, I soon lost interest. The second half was unnecessarily prolonged.

When I finished reading Noel's novel, I wondered if there was any purpose to it. Dr. Charles Johnson wrote in his "The Way of the Writer" that good fiction expands one's reality, but great fiction changes it. Meantime did neither for me.

There were, as some reviewers have noted, excellent turns of phrase in this book. I recall Noel comparing a goat's slit throat to a necklace of black blood. There were also sentences that bewildered me. I remember the protagonist (whose name I forget) worrying over her husband's "leftward hooking penis" in the hospital.

Everything considered, Noel's novel is decent fiction; I look forward to reading Halfway House and her future works.
One person found this helpful
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M. Miller
5.0 out of 5 stars Meantime grows on you if you let it
Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2018
The slower pace of this novel takes a little getting used to – the reader needs to stay with this book until the end, and think about it, to reap its reward. Having a little knowledge of northern Californian culture doesn’t hurt either – Claire Hood is a prototype of her alma matter, University of Santa Cruz, a school known for turning out empowered women used to having control in their relationships. What makes this novel worth reading is that its heroine is a character who knows how she comes across to others, and who despite all her sassy one-liners, is willing to admit it, even though it hurts as badly as it does.

Claire is a hard-working, stick-thin, California transplant, one whose childhood was transformed by her parents failed experiment at polyamory. The one good thing that emerges from Claire’s experience in the Naked Family is her deep connection with Nicole, a friend who becomes as close as a sister might have been. The one good thing that came out of the muddled years of exploration after college, from which the novel draws its title, “Meantime”, is her youthful marriage to Jeremy, a man with whom she can spend hours in bed at night just talking to.

This is not an action-packed novel; past memories drive the plot as much as the couple’s current predicament (Jeremy’s illness) does. Each chapter tries to answer the question, in Claire’s mind, of where and why things went so wrong. How does she end up trying to save her marriage from being wrecked by a woman who has none of her desirable qualities or, as Claire puts it when she turns the spotlight on herself, “How could coolness take so much work, and yet mean nothing? And how could I only be realizing it now?”

Claire may not be honest with the people around her, but her character is honest with her reader – the irony of her life, and the fakeness of her personality, comes out in her everyday circumstances, which Noel captures here and there with the perfectly worded sentence. Much of the pleasure from reading this novel is waiting for the understated dialogue that reveals a heartbreaking mistake, or the perceptive observation on Claire’s life contained in a unique phrase, or the author’s subtle “take” on her main character – for example, Claire has a real distaste for anything vulgar, but she takes pride in her vulgar surroundings, and pleasure in showing it off, emphasizing how little she herself is associated with vulgarity.

How could this novel be improved? Developing the backstory, and fleshing out the personalities and motivations of characters who shaped Claire’s childhood needed to happen, and didn’t. Each flashback SHOWS you a story, but most readers also need the author to TELL it – it is confusing and convoluted, otherwise. The experimental use of transitions – jumping without warning from a memory in one paragraph to the present in the next paragraph – takes some getting used to. Better segues would allow for reading flow as the story unfolds.

While reading, I kept thinking that this was an amazing first novel, even though I realize it is the author’s second book (and admit to not having read the first one). If her next novel fixes a few of the problems that added distractions in this one, it could potentially be a truly great novel that would hopefully get the very wide readership it deserves.
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