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Daylight Saving Time
a novel Daylight Saving Time is Peter Doobinin’s second novel in his projected trilogy about the Long Island suburbs. Specifically, the run-of-the-mill, middle class suburbs that sprang up, like dandelions on an ill-kept lawn, during the years after World War II. Told in the first person, the novel relates the story of a lifelong denizen of these so-called Baby Boom suburbs. It spans a fifty year period, chronicling the main character's life from the days of his childhood, through his adult years as he attempts to find meaning and joy in his suburban existence. The book, the protagonist tells us, is a “document” of his life. |
From Daylight Saving Time
"It was, of course, the prototypical migration, the migration my mother and my father made from Queens to Bayview. It was the requisite move. Leave the city, move to the suburbs, buy a house, claim your fair share of the earth.
The presiding mythology suggests that the suburbs were viewed by people like my mother and my father as some sort of Promised Land. Although I don’t know that my parents looked at it quite like that, in such vaunted terms.
In any case, we know, by now, how it turned out. The suburbs didn’t turn out to be a Promised Land. Suburban Life didn’t provide the Great Answer. There’s been alot written about it, by novelists, memoirists, journalists, essayists, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, contemporary pundits and the like. It’s been well documented, the way the suburbs didn’t fulfill their promise, the way things went awry.
As for myself, I didn’t have to read the reports. I lived it. I saw it all, firsthand. I was there.”
"It was, of course, the prototypical migration, the migration my mother and my father made from Queens to Bayview. It was the requisite move. Leave the city, move to the suburbs, buy a house, claim your fair share of the earth.
The presiding mythology suggests that the suburbs were viewed by people like my mother and my father as some sort of Promised Land. Although I don’t know that my parents looked at it quite like that, in such vaunted terms.
In any case, we know, by now, how it turned out. The suburbs didn’t turn out to be a Promised Land. Suburban Life didn’t provide the Great Answer. There’s been alot written about it, by novelists, memoirists, journalists, essayists, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, contemporary pundits and the like. It’s been well documented, the way the suburbs didn’t fulfill their promise, the way things went awry.
As for myself, I didn’t have to read the reports. I lived it. I saw it all, firsthand. I was there.”
Listen: Peter Doobinin reads from the first pages of Daylight Saving Time...
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