Minus Time [Paperback]

When Canadian astronaut Barbara Urie blasts into space, her disaster-relief worker husband is too busy to attend, and her adult children, Helen and Paul, are too conflicted to turn up, so NASA provides actors to stand in for her family at the Florida launch site. Naturally, this launches the horrified children into a whole new layer of identity crisis in Catherine Bush's Gen-X treatise, Minus Time. It's not that the Uries are a dysfunctional family--indeed Barbara, husband David, and engineering student son Paul are all hyper-achievers. But daughter Helen just wants to be normal, and while her mother makes history orbiting in space, she joins a radical group of animal liberationists and desperately pretends to have a normal, sitcom-perfect home life.

Minus Time offers glimmers of the themes of risk and safety that define Bush's follow-up novel, The Rules of Engagement, and doesn't shy away from sweeping themes like what it means to grow up Canadian in the shadow of U.S. culture. But at its rawest, Minus Time reveals the confusion and rage of a woman who can't quite forgive her mother for fulfilling career dreams at the expense of a dubious and elusive family ideal: "One day [Helen] pulled out Madame Bovary, which she read in hours, haunted afterward not by Emma but Emma's daughter, left behind at the end, ignored and half-wild, who had no clothes that fit her and had never been taught to read. What, she asked the dead and faraway M. Flaubert, was going to happen to her?" --Deirdre Hanna

An extreme case of emotional--and literal--distance occupies Bush in this provocative, if at times overwrought debut. Set in the plausible present day, the story is alternately narrated by and descriptive of 20-year-old Toronto resident Helen Urie, whose mother Barbara is one of two history-making astronauts out to set a record for time spent orbiting the earth. The tale opens during "minus time," the countdown to the launch that carries Barbara and her partner to their space station. Helen henceforth communicates with her mother via telephone and satellite feed. Readers learn that Barbara's unusual detachment was presaged by her intense interest in studying science during Helen's and her brother's childhood; both siblings and their father felt they took a back seat to Barbara's ambitions. (This scenario yields debatable suggestions that career mothers, no matter how capable, cheat their families of attention.) It is often difficult to feel sorry for Helen: her excessive celebrity is unconvincing, as is her paranoia about the media, which eventually drives her underground to anonymously befriend a subversive environmental group. Still, after a long and low-key buildup of Helen's suppressed grievances, Bush arrives at a strong resolution that reunites the Urie family, figuratively at least.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Patchy yet captivating first novel about familial fractures- -with an unusual conceit. The conceit is that heroine Helen Urie, 20, is separated from her mother not only by emotional distance but by an unprecedented physical gap--because Canadian astronaut Barbara Urie is orbiting the Earth as half of a male-female team aiming to set a record for in-space habitation. The story opens with Helen and her brother, Paul, watching from a deliberate distance as Barbara rockets into orbit--``and in that instant, everything...changed,'' including the validity of perception: That night, the two gaze in disbelief as a TV replay shows their doubles at the launch's viewing stand--``a backup family'' supplied by a media-minded NASA for the no-show siblings who chose to watch from afar. Also backed-up is their dad, David, whom they haven't seen since he lit out years before to provide earthquake relief when the ``Big One'' hit L.A. (one of several ecodisasters that backdrop the plot). Author Bush pushes the sense of dislocation by alternating first- and third-person narration as Helen returns to hometown Toronto and takes an anonymous job waitressing. She also joins an animal-rights group, which leads to her unmasking when she's arrested for civil disobedience. But that act of defiance begins a transformative dialogue between Helen and Barbara (via telephone and closed- circuit TV), and--after Barbara is forced to make a fateful decision about staying in orbit--the entire family has a chance to start anew.... A slightly surreal collage of often remarkable images and sensitively drawn characters that doesn't quite cohere--but that Bush is a talent to watch is without doubt. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Widely praised by critics in Canada and the U.S., shortlisted for the 1994 SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award and a City of Toronto Book Award, Minus Time made a stunningly successful publishing debut. Now with the February 2000 release of Catherine Bush’s second novel, The Rules of Engagement (see page 9), and interest from the film community, this is the perfect time for the new PerennialCanada edition of Minus Time.

With surreal lyricism and edgy, deadpan wit, Catherine Bush’s Minus Time traces the desire of a young woman to make a place for herself in a media-mad, toxic-scare-filled world. Helen’s mother is an astronaut trying to set an endurance record in a space station. Her father, a disaster-relief specialist, circles the world saving people from catastrophe. What kind of family is possible when your parents are in constant motion and there’s so much space separating you from them? With risks of disaster all around, how do you dream a future for yourself? 

Set in a world where external events aptly mirror the drama of personal relationships, Minus Time offers up a brilliantly observed, deeply moving tale of millennial life, in a voice sliced through with irony and awe.

CATHERINE BUSH is the author of the novel Minus Time, which was shortlisted for the 1994 SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award and a City of Toronto Book Award and published internationally. It is currently being adapted for the big screen. Born in Toronto, Bush has also resided in Montreal, New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts, and has a degree in Comparative Literature from Yale University. She now lives in Toronto.