Minus Time

Laila Abdalla is an associate professor of English at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, and former professor at McGill University.

This novel does a good job of mirroring the ennui of a group of people
who have dubbed themselves lost. Unfortunately, almost nothing happens
in the novel, and though the prose is clear it is deficient in both wit
and lyricism.

The protagonist, Helen, is so stereotypically atypical that she fails
to develop any depth as a character. A university dropout, she joins an
activist group that spends its time surreptitiously applying stickers
bearing such messages as “EAT THIS AND YOU’RE DEAD MEAT” to
supermarket meat refrigerators. Helen’s dysfunctional family life,
irrelevant intellectual life, and environmentally concerned
sociopolitical life are explicit signs that we are in the land of the
twenty-something generation. Our guide through this bleak (yet trite)
landscape is humorless and suffers from a singular lack of imagination.

Helen’s life is much like the tofu cheesecake she offers her activist
lover: it implicitly criticizes the real thing, yet it also mimics it.
Like tofu cheesecake, this novel looks like and presents itself as the
real thing, but ultimately it is not.