I'm back from committing a homicide on "time". I've killed time and now I'm back in the home environment. Here's Richard Valley's review of Kritzer Time, which will appear in the next issue of Scarlet Street.
KRITZER TIME
Bruce Kimmel
1st Books Library, 2004
356 pages—$19.95
All good things must come to an end, but at least with a trilogy it takes longer. Bruce Kimmel’s autobiographical fiction Kritzer Time brings the curtain down on the adolescent adventures of Benjamin Kritzer, begun (appropriately) in Benjamin Kritzer (2002) and continued in Kritzerland (2003). Put these volumes all together and you’ve not only got one very big book, but you’ve got a vivid, moving evocation of a special time and place in our country’s troubled history.
The time is the early sixties, when traces of the fifties still lingered in the wings and no one would ever have guessed that the decade would end with the Vietnam War, with protests, with love-ins and flower power, with gay rights and the women’s movement, with X-rated films starring actual movie stars, and with a crook in the White House. Disaster sets the stage for this dark future, though, from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas—an event that Benjamin, try as he might, cannot view as anything other than remote—to a terrifying, tragic incident that hits harder and closer to home. Home, by the way, is Los Angeles and environs, a sprawling landscape undergoing nearly as many changes as the now-teenage Benjamin.
It is with Kritzer Time that Kimmel plots the rest of Benjamin’s life. Those familiar with the author’s own career prior to his authorship know that Benjamin’s destiny lies in the arts, as an actor, songwriter, singer, producer, director. In Kritzer Time, we move beyond those tentative steps as an entertainer taken by Benjamin in the previous books; when the final pages are at hand, when it’s time for his literary 11 o’clock showstopper, Benjamin has hit his stride and there’s no turning back. Not for nothing is one of his favorite show tunes “Hey, Look Me Over!”
As in Benjamin Kritzer and Kritzerland, the cultural details—the signposts up ahead—will bring a gentle smile or a nostalgic sigh to anyone who grew up in the same decade as Benjamin. The cultural colors with which Kimmel paints his novel include television’s THE TWILIGHT ZONE, MILLION DOLLAR MOVIE, and MAVERICK; the songs “Wooly Booly,” “Pocketful of Miracles,” “Firefly,” “Days of Wine and Roses,” and “Moon River;” the films SCENT OF MYSTERY (1960, in Smell-o-Vision), WEST SIDE STORY (1961), THE PARENT TRAP (1961), GYPSY (1962), THE MUSIC MAN (1962), and BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ (1962); telephone prefix letters, Columbia House Stereophonic Record Players, summer camp, summer stock, Freddie Blassie, Phil Silvers, Judy Garland, Haystack Calhoun, Dave Brubeck, Gorgeous George, and Hayley Mills.
Kritzer Time is, in a way, twilight time—the end of an era and the end of a heartwarming, endearing series of books. Still, as Benjamin, not without a trace of sadness, learns, life goes on. Let’s hope that it goes on to include further novels from the talented Mr. Kimmel.
—Richard Valley
