Hank Schachte author Killing Time Reviews

YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS
HANK SCHACHTE comes to his first novel with a roster of writerly credits: radio drama, stage plays, a fitness manual and a feature film, Silence, screened at Sundance in 1999. With his leap to the novel genre, he demonstrates, with wonderful precision and compression, the unique intimacy of prose fiction.

Schachte tells a story that from its first words plunges us into the essence of consciousness, showing us the world through a mind emerging from total amnesia. The first sentences feel strange, then quickly take on an eerie familiarity—as familiar as a slice of life (in this case a picnic for two), but eerie in that it lacks the temporal canvas on which all events are painted: memory.

For Richard, who needs to be constantly re-apprised of who and where he is and who he's with, each day is is a familiar and familiarly odd succession of continuous present moments. It's unreal, dreamlike, but even less grounded in succession than most dreams. The book's evocation of a genuine tabula rasa is quietly exhilarating.

A few pages in, I realized that there were no commas—not a one, anywhere. A scan through the book confirmed it.
It's a bracing departure from convention, all in the service of showing us a human psyche cut loose- freed, in a way—from perceptual norms. Here is Richard observing Paul as they sit in a car in the rain outside a hospital, having just grasped that their mother is dying:

“Paul sits silent staring at the wipers sucking across in front of him wanting to go somewhere. They pull out heading down away from the hospital taking some turns skipping others deliberately getting somewhere to some other place.”

The image of the wipers strikes me as a metaphoric gem, the kind of sentence that imparts its meanings best the less you dig for them. The novel is studded with images and sentences that reward unhurried, meditative reading.

As the structure of Richard's memory gradually fills in, he decides to set the results down on paper. That narrative concludes the book, a view of Richard's eight missing months as he imagines them through the eyes of Paul and Cindy. With a sly synthesis of the inevitable and the revelatory, Schachte leads us full circle, back to the picnic, and Cindy's careless wrenching of Richard. back into time, among those who must grapple with who they are.
Jim Bartley, The Globe and Mail, Toronto 11 March 2006.

TIME TRAVELS
In a creative writing class I once took, a fellow student confidently assured me one should never write about cancer or car accidents, because, “you know, it's been done.”

Despite dismissing her advice—aren't any writing “rules” made to be broken? I admit to skepticism upon picking up Hank Schachte's debut novel, Killing Time. Not only did the jacket copy promise a car accident, but what seemed one worse, the resulting amnesia.

Long a disorder as endemic to soap operas as it is rare in the real-life population, I worried over the melodrama such a set-up promised. Not to mention that even the book's press release makes the link to the film Memento, which has, you know, been done.

I was wrong. Schachte has written a beautiful, lyrical, affecting novel. In sparse, at times staccato, language, he explores the relationship between memory and time and the wonderful and terrible dependencies created by people who love, but cannot rescue, one another.

The plot is deceptively simple. In 1977, two brothers, Paul and Richard, are in a car accident. Paul recovers immediately; Richard spends weeks in the hospital with substantial brain injuries. Paul and his French girlfriend, Cindy, eventually take Richard home, but he is irrevocably changed: unable to form new memories, he is returned to a state of infancy where everything is “continually surprising.” As Richard regresses, Paul and Cindy's relationship disintegrates.

The novel opens with Richard's recovery. Like a fairytale princess, Richard is reawakened by Cindy's touch - spontaneous and adulterous. “Oh Richard don't do this...Don't start remembering now,” Cindy pleads, but it is too late. Richard has returned, but the dark secret of the car accident haunts his healing.

Schachte is his best when he chronicles the guilty desire between Richard, Cindy and Paul: each envious of the bond between the other two. The night Richard regains his memory he secretly watches Cindy:

'She is hopping down the wooden steps in pale silk camisole that glows aquamarine in the moonlight running on lithe legs along to the side of the house and disappearing around a corner then quickly Paul is on the deck still attempting to tie the drawstring of his sweat pants as he jumps the steps to the grass…. Her voice is muffled—perhaps against his chest—hard for Richard to make out. He hears the front door close. They haven't seen him — he bites his lip — but he has seen them.'

The form of the novel speaks to the content: at first disorienting, we gradually adjust to its strange syntax just as Richard, Paul and Cindy acclimate themselves to the reality of a damaged mind.

Alone in his father's Gulf Island cabin, where he retreats following his recovery, Richard makes up for Cindy's absence by recreating her on paper. In an attempt to recapture the seven months he has lost, he writes Cindy's account of the accident and its aftermath. This novel-within-a-novel comprises the second half of the book, the imagined past (the only past there is, Schachte would remind us) following the present. “Now he will be her,” Richard realizes, as he begins to write in Cindy's voice, “another way of having.”

Richard and Paul's eventual confrontation — inevitable and ugly — is the book's weakest moment: following the death of their mother and a bit of alcohol-induced violence, it is the only scene that hints of melodrama. Luckily, Schachte moves quickly away, imitating the forward and backward fly-fish cast of the mind as Richard envisions those long months of illness when memory, which makes us human, was lost.
Ilana Stanger-Ross, Rabble.ca, Toronto

MEMORY'S ROLE
All we are is memory: a brutal truth, but one so couched in cliché and clumsy restatement that it has lost its bite. It takes real teeth to restore the force of such an essential truth. A run-in with Alzheimer's does the trick. And so, occasionally, does art.

Memory is the core of Hank Schachte's artful debut novel Killing Time. The book's central character, Richard, exists in a kind of stasis, outside of both time and recollection. The victim of a car accident, he has lost not only his memory, but also the ability to form new ones. All Richard really has is the immediate moment, and the increasingly conscious recognition that '[t]here is no life without time. There is no time without memory. There is no life without memory.'

The only continuity in Richard's life comes from his two caregivers: his brother Paul and his brother's girlfriend, Cindy. Plagued by guilt over the accident—and his own memories of what his brother once was—Paul anchors his sibling's life, holding him in place. Cindy herself is willingly dragged into the undertow of Richard's disability, documenting [with her photographs] its devastation, tracing small steps toward recovery, and providing her own somewhat aimless life with a central focus. Eventually, she becomes the point of a painful triangle that spurs Richard to step back inside himself and begin to regain his identity.

For such a short novel- under 140 jpages- Killing Time takes on hugely ambitious themes. The relationships between time, memory and identity can—and have—fill volumes in the hands of other authors. Yet, perversely, the book's very brevity works for it, making the reader acutely aware of its quick passage and purveying a sense of urgency and dislocation that mirrors Richard's own struggle. This struggle is also echoed in Schachte's risky structure: the book does indeed kill time, as the author eschews standard sequence-of-events storytelling, preferring instead to move moments out of chronological order. Killing Time … succeeds in reminding readers of the all-importance of memory in our lives.
Jim Oaten, Vancouver Review

AFTER THE CRASH
I picked up Hank Schachte's novel at the Saturna General Store partly on an impulse of loyalty to a local artist and partly because the cover photographs (by the author, with design by his daughter Kim) and title intrigued me. I soon found myself reading and rereading it with growing interest. It is a beautifully crafted story in which the interplay of characters and the theme of time draw the reader in to a powerful drama with considerable philosophic interest. (There are also discarded panties, a love triangle and a fair amount of food, to keep the philosophy grounded.)

…In Schachte's novel, the protaganist, Richard, is brain-damaged and suffering from amnesia following a car crash. He struggles to understand his situation but his clot-clouded brain can only latch on to memories of the fiery crash of Lorenzo Bandini in the Monaco Grand Prix way back in 1968... His protective older brother, who was driving recklessly at the time of the accident and his brother's new photographer girlfriend are the other two main characters. Between these three the plot unfolds in a tight and engaging drama where loyalties are tested and emotions strained. Someone without immediate memory cannot learn from day to day or even hour to hour. While this may result in a superficially agreeable, non-judgemental, naïve character, anyone struggling to act as the caregiver to such a person will experience tensions that can only build until at some point they just have to break.

This is not a page-turner to skip through in a daze on a summer beach. To read it takes concentration, and Schachte's partial inversion of the time frame adds to that need. It's a short, packed book best read in one alert sitting. This concentration pays off in an interesting borderline adventure into what it means to be human in time. The style is as taut as in a Michael Ondaatje work, and some mysteries remain unresloved, but the prose is charged and beautiful and full of originality…
Bill Schermbrucker, Capilano College, Vancouver

REVIEWS:PRAISE FOR 'KILLING TIME' by hank schachte Published by New Star Books, 2006

JIM BARTLEY -The Globe and Mail, Toronto 11 March 2006


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ILANA STANGER-ROSS - Rabble.ca Toronto

JIM OATEN -Vancouver Review

BILL SCHERMBRUCKER - Capilano College, Vancouver