Robin Lippincott’s In the Meantime is a beautiful novel about time and friendship and hope, and the elasticity of them all, how they can stretch and snap back. About how we expect so much from all three, all of our dreams to come true and on the timelines we demand, and our friendships to endure, support, and enliven us. The book is about no matter how much time and friendship and dreams are valued, we never have enough, in the end.
The concept of place also plays a role in this story of the lifelong friendship of three people, Kathryn, Luke, and Sterling: the place they all come from and where they first meet each other, a white “nondescript” neighborhood in a small Midwestern town; the black “Quarter” where half-black Starling must move after a series of racial incidents in high school; New York City, their dreamed-of escape pod to adulthood, and all its wondrous spots; and Boston, Paris, and Frankfurt.
Time is the connecting tissue between friendship, hopes, and place, as it is in real life. We use our memories of the past for succor or for spurs forward to something better or backward to recapture what we once knew; and time is the measure of friendship, the ones that endure and the ones that within a moment of recognition can be cemented, a new friendship as firm as an old one. We set timetables for achieving our goals and dreams and when age suddenly bears down, we are caught, surprised by what we’ve failed to do and usually not impressed enough by what we have done. We find ourselves suddenly too old now for this or that, there not enough time left for other plans we had, and opportunities are lost forever that when available, seemed infinite. Time is a force that changes not only us, but can alter our places (home, favored city ) from something known deeply to something utterly new and foreign.
And time changes memory. Sterling, looking back on his first memory, is disturbed by how sterile the memory is, just a view out his bedroom window: “he, too — like so many others who have traveled this path before him — has to wonder if this, his first memory, is revisionist, colored by what followed (that is, his life.) He cannot say for sure, and that is the troublesome thing.” In The Meantime takes us through the lives that unfold for the three main characters from their very first memory. In their first recollections, we see a pattern for each lifetime. Or was the pattern set by life’s twists, and then used to revise earliest memory? What we choose, consciously or unconsciously, to remember about our past says as much about our lives (and ourselves) as what we choose to do with our present and future.
There is a wonderful chapter that was published as a stand-alone piece about the moment of the bombing of Nagasaki and the space in time that surrounded that one moment for one survivor: his memories of people who have died, the space in time blown open by the bombing, the aftermath of horrors, and his future of being weighed down by the friendships lost in that moment and of his journey forward without the support of time, friendship, or hope.
In The Meantime is a beautifully written novel about what we are given in life, and what we do with all that we have; what we squander, what we hold dear, and what we cannot hold onto, no matter how hard we try.
