Review: As Time Goes By by W. Royce Adams

As Time Goes By by W. Royce Adams is a beautifully written, heartfelt, fictional memoir, in which the stories of a lifetime trigger profound reflections on life, love, and death. With unique irony and mastery of the written word, W. Royce Adams questions his own life and life writ large, guiding the reader through an unforgettable journey.

Looking back on his life as an almost 90-year-old man, the author can zoom into his memories in incredible detail, crystallized in time and yet very alive, with a deep sense of direction and perspective, tracing the many trails of his story from their source. With original and absorbing prose, the book manages to be the imprint of an uncommon mind, while also generously allowing the reader to identify themselves in the narrative.

Told from the perspective of a protagonist bluntly but provocatively named Old, the story starts with the 12-year-old son of a very religious couple during a summer as they share the house with his maternal grandfather. The boy finds out a whole new side to life from what he had learned from his parents, and although he struggles for a while to reconcile this newly discovered sense of freedom with his Christian guilt, the religious angst gradually fades as he grows into a teenager, to be replaced by a voracious hunger for experience.

Encouraged by his parents to enroll in university, he is forced to stop his studies in order to join the Navy. After these formative years he spends learning military discipline, he puts his mind back into studying and improving his writing. He is already a successful photojournalist by the time he gets to interview Abby Heart, the jazz singer that had dazzled him many years before at a gig, and who was going to become the first real love of his life, an engaging portrait showing a life truly lived.

The book doesn’t start with where and when the author was born, but with his first memory – that of five-pointed blue-black stars and a sharp pain, probably the result of hitting his head falling from a rocking horse. This hard-to-grasp and yet vivid vision sums up rather well how the author tells this story – beyond the factual, and yet never self-indulgently emotional, encapsulating all the strangeness and beauty of being alive, with characters that shine through the pages not so much by virtue of what they do or say, but by the essence of their personalities, the fascinating halos they emanate, making the book feel very tangible and true. Jazz, an obsession that weaves beautifully through the book, plays a key role, music being the web that connected him to the most important people in his life.

Though the book perhaps gets off to a slightly slow start, with literary references that become too philosophical before one is totally acquainted with the scope and breadth of the prose, the writing is incredibly sharp and down-to-earth overall. The combination of the author’s knack for narration, his clear depth of thought and feeling, and his penchant for irony make for a truly meaningful reading experience.

All told, As Time Goes By is an intense, absorbing, funny, and remarkably poignant work, which will leave any reader feeling like they have shared in both a unique life and a wholly original work of autofiction.