‘The Time It Takes To Fall’ by Margaret Lazarus Dean
Simon & Schuster, $24, 320 pages
By Kate Rockwood
Published: March 27th, 2007 | 11:08am
On January 29, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger explodes, killing all seven astronauts on board. The local community’s shock and the nation’s growing disenchantment with what was once an exciting discipline serve as the backdrop to Margaret Lazarus Dean’s debut novel
At the heart of Dean’s story is 12-year-old Dolores Gray, whose father works as a technician at NASA. Growing up in the town of Cape Canaveral, Florida, Dolores is swept up with the excitement of space travel. She dreams of becoming an astronaut, and feverishly maintains a space notebook — crammed with details of every launch, right down to the eye color of the female astronauts on each mission — while skipping grades and trouncing classmates in physics and math. For a young girl, growing up in the shadow of the public space program can be an aspirational place to thrive.
Unfortunately, the town’s fortune also rises and falls with NASA. As the nation’s interest in space travel wanes, Dolores’s father is first fired then rehired at whim. He winds up working on the faulty spacecraft, though his culpability remains unclear. Meanwhile, Dolores builds a case that her mother, alternately lavish in her attentions and cold in her indifference, is having an affair with a NASA engineer senior to her father’s position. Her suspicions only seem to be confirmed when her mother packs her bags and moves to a mysterious location.
Rather than prod the remnants of her own familial unit for meaning and causation, Dolores pours herself into her love of space, but shifts her focus from space travel to the spacecraft itself. What crucial step in construction was botched or sabotaged?, she wonders, as if any answer could lend meaning to her own crisis.
In The Time It Takes To Fall, what starts as merely a worthwhile read unfurls as a tight, nuanced story that easily outpaces other capable coming-of-age novels due to its interesting metaphors and crisp, clear prose. Dean’s debut could be likened to a well-craft spacecraft. Both are the result of skilled assemblage, a thousand woven fragments that combine to create something altogether more than its pieces — something almost magical once in motion.
Issue #26
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