The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Time Lapse, by Alvin Greenberg
reviewed by Pedro Ponce

Alvin Greenberg. Time Lapse. Tupelo, 2003. 308 pp. $22.95.

For Walter Job, the protagonist of Alvin Greenberg’s darkly comic novel Time Lapse, “death is an easy thing to manage. Life is another matter.” Walter, an accomplished professor of modern literature, leads a double life as a hired killer. This makes for some hectic academic conferences, to say the least: “And when he has let the dead man slump back into the swivel chair, he will roll the wire up and put it back in his pocket and, touching nothing else, gather up his papers and briefcase and depart. He will drive the easy hour and a half on the freeway back to Cincinnati, where the Society for the Study of Modernist Aesthetics will have completed the first day of its annual July meetings, and he will be aware, once again, how, just like that, a death will have been managed, so very easily.” While Walter’s dual employment is the source of some of the novel’s funniest and most unsettling moments, it is more than just a clever gimmick. Instead, it can be seen as just one example of a killer instinct that is disturbingly ubiquitous. Significantly, Walter’s initiation into the murder business stems from a husband’s drunken threat against his wife in a bar rather than the high-stakes underworld of the cinematic thriller. The novel shrewdly dissects not only the lurking presence of violence but also its naive simplification in popular media. The easy escape of a woman from the hands of a killer on television prompts wry and morbid reflection: “Only by such a vision of the incompetence of death, thinks Walter, is humanity shielded from reality.” Greenberg, on the other hand, refuses to indulge such a vision. Beginning as an academic farce, Time Lapse develops into a provocative novel of ideas.