A small Southern town. A restless boy. An embittered father. And late one night, a careless mistake.
Aspiring teenage filmmaker Josh Lovejoy, uncharacteristically high one night, hits a jogger. It is not any jogger, but David Masters, a popular local activist in the small town of Milledge, Georgia. The accident puts Masters in the hospital in a coma, and shatters the fragile equilibrium of the Lovejoy family. Josh's father, Hal, a clockmaker who keeps timepieces running with a passion he fails to bring to his marriage, retreats to his clock shop. Helen Lovejoy, a dedicated mother and amateur painter, falls into a depression. A shocked Josh reluctantly takes up his court-ordered community service work with disabled children. Meanwhile, comatose David is visited by the ghost of singer Peggy Lee, while his childless wife, Meg, an elementary school teacher, tries to imagine her life without him. In her grief, Meg becomes obsessed with the Lovejoy family. As the adults around him try to find their footing, Josh indulges in dreams of his future as a famous filmmaker. In love with an unstable girl and estranged from his parents, Josh follows her to New York City, where, overwhelmed, he makes a fateful decision that puts him beyond the help of those who love him.
Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights era and the New South, The Timekeeper’s Son weaves the lives of these five characters together exposing hidden learning disabilities, broken dreams, complicated relationships, and communication difficulties. It explores themes of grief and forgiveness, isolation and connection, masks and disguises, all while depicting its characters’ lives with tender intimacy. Written with a poet’s sensibility to language and imagery, with impeccable pacing, and with elements of both the thriller and magical realism, this is a singular novel not to be missed.
A literary novel follows two Southern families connected by an accident. Josh Lovejoy has enough problems as a 17-year-old in Milledge, Georgia—a stern father and filmmaking dreams he’s unsure how to pursue—before he gets high and drives into a jogger. The runner turns out to be David Masters, a beloved local activist who is planning a congressional run: “Josh noticed something out of the corner of his eye, something moving, and then, before he could notice anything else, he realized he’d hit something, he’d braked, that something had happened.” Josh ends up sentenced to community service, but the accident has severe emotional repercussions for his parents. Helen, a frustrated painter, slips into a depressive episode while Hal, a severe clockmaker, moves into his shop and decides to wash his hands of his family. The trauma extends to the Masters household. David’s wife, Meg, a second-grade teacher, attempts to grapple with her feelings of grief, anger, confusion, and resentment—toward Josh, yes, but also her husband. David remains alive but comatose. He is visited regularly by the apparition of singer Peggy Lee, who forces David to examine an old friendship that started him on his career in public service. As five lives attempt to move past this tragic event, the bonds of love, family, and forgiveness are stretched to their greatest limits. Baker’s (Mail-Order Bride, 2017) prose is crisp and precise, tethered to her characters’ emotions in a way that imbues every scene and observation with meaning: “Their life together had always followed a punctual, orderly progression. Now the oven clock said 5:20 and the wall clock said 3:05 and then the digital bedroom clock...just blinked 12:00.” The characters are finely drawn, and Baker isn’t afraid to spend a lot of time on the way they process the eruptions in their lives (though, at nearly 400 pages, a little less time would have been fine). No major revelations or twists are hiding in the bushes. Rather, this is a serious and engrossing exploration of tragedy and the emotions that come with it. An absorbing and deliberatively composed tale about reactions to trauma.
