AS TIME GOES BY takes on one of the oldest philosophical questions known to humankind: What is the sum of a life? W. Royce Adams’ faux-autobiographical novel offers a wide-ranging, if not fully satisfying, window on a twentieth-century life. The subject, Old–born in the 1930s, learned enough to paraphrase Melville and recognize the opening lines of the Canterbury Tales, and now nearing the end of his life–recounts his childhood, adolescence and adulthood in a series of vignettes in search of meaning. The stirrings of sexual attraction, school friends, Christian guilt, and military service get due attention, before the narrator goes on to cover some of the tragedies, disappointments, and pitfalls that come later: the death of a beloved pet; a cancer diagnosis; a friend’s deathbed confession of infidelity with Old’s wife, never to be discussed, or verified.

These vignettes are sometimes funny; often they are poignant. Sometimes they are held up to wider scrutiny as to their ultimate meaning, but by and large these points are less satisfying than they might seem. AS TIME GOES BY is at its strongest when it dispenses with the cod-philosophical musings and the allusions to Nietzsche, and concentrates on simple, straightforward storytelling. Adams’ style is easygoing and only rarely yields to floridness. Curiously enough, the question the novel proposes is both its strength and its weakness. By Old’s own admission, his life was, in its way, a selfish one: he pursued gratification (though not, it must be said, in a vindictive fashion), and will leave “no grave to be renowned”. But while we do conceive of Old the man, and get a good impression of his wants, needs, and desires, beyond the facts of his loves there is little remarkable about him. The episodic character of the book naturally lends itself to considering each period of his life in isolation, and surprisingly little is lost by approaching the story in this way; it is as though Old – who so often remarks in the book how unsure he really is of who he is – makes of his “memoir” a microcosm of his own uncertainties. Then again, perhaps it is in that fact that the reader may find a delicious irony, a playful retort to the question of what life amounts to. By making Old an epicure, one who is sure of nothing so much as his own need to savor, Adams seems to suggest to the reader that, if nothing endures, there is nothing to savor so much as living in the moment.

AS TIME GOES BY by W. Royce Adams offers poignant reminiscences of days past, seen through the eyes of an old man of the point of death.

~Craig Jones for IndieReader