Image of One Day Soon Time Will Have No Place Left to Hide by Christian Kiefer


     

Renowned installation artist Frank Poole has embarked on his most ambitious project to date: an entire housing subdivision in the desert of Nevada, with every element painted stark white. By his side is his young wife Caitlin, his manager and confidante who keeps the volatile artist functioning from day to day. But as Frank grows increasingly anxious about his undertaking, Caitlin learns she is pregnant and begins to wonder what the future might hold for them both.
      At turns funny, tragic, triumphant and harrowing, One Day Soon Time Will Have No Place Left to Hide is a documentary film in prose. Structured as a “kinoroman,” a novella-as-film-script-as novella, the text explores the nature of art, of watching and of being watched, of life put on display, all the while focusing on the day-to-day existence of one couple as they work through the incendiary materials of their lives together.
 

MARCH 22, 2016

“This novella carries the highest ambition: to articulate how art exists outside of time and is, at once, the purest and most selfish pursuit of all. A gorgeous, human commentary on the paradox of modern life and modern art.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“This novella carries the highest ambition: to articulate how art exists outside of time and is, at once, the purest and most selfish pursuit of all. A gorgeous, human commentary on the paradox of modern life and modern art.”
-Publishers Weekly

“The best experimental American writing doesn’t have to look funny on the page, as mainstream Irish story writer Frank O’Connor once defined experiment. It takes us down into the interstices of intelligence and shows us just what it is that connects everything, from the grand to the ridiculous, to everything else. Heartbreak in a line break, wisdom by means of punctuation. Christian Kiefer knows this, shows us, leads us in work such as this onward, ever onward, into new realms of experience. I’m now a dedicated follower.”
—Alan Cheuse, author of Prayers for the Living

“In an exceptional novella as much about constructing narrative as it is about negating it, Christian Kiefer brilliantly breaks down the fourth wall to lure us into a world of walls: literal and metaphorical, physical and ethereal, those between people, those between spaces, those between times, and those ambiguous ones between art and life.”
—Susan Steinberg, author of Spectacle

“In his cool mercury depiction of the life of a conceptual artist in the American West, Christian Kiefer’s killer novella brings to mind, all at once: Joan Didion, Don DeLillo, William T. Vollmann, and even a sly heady whiff of Thomas Pynchon. But the heart that pounds in the chest of One Day Soon Time Will Have No Place Left to Hide reveals itself in the burdened, complicated relationship between Frank and Caitlin Poole. The metafiction in this novella will draw you in with its winking intellect, but the fully realized humans under its synthetic skin will keep you reading. Christian Kiefer is a masterful stylist with ideas to burn.”
—Daniel Torday, author of The Last Flight of Poxl West and The Sensualist

“A truly cinematic novella. Wildly inventive. Harnesses the spirit of Don DeLillo and Mark Danielewski to create something utterly original and moving. You’ll want to read it more than once.”
—Nicholas Rombes, author of The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing

“Christian Kiefer’s new novella-cum-documentary blueprint, One Day Soon Time Will Have No Place Left to Hide, makes public ‘the privatopia beyond the noise wall…’ and compels the bizarre to bump-and-grind with the quotidian, the world without with the world within, finding—via his delightfully unexpected characters (one of which may or may not be the reader-as-voyeur), and prose that marries the hilarious with the incantatory—that the best of our sad holinesses lurk beneath the asphalt of our parking lots, a cone emptied of its ice cream, and all agonizing estrangement that confuses itself for a nostalgia fetish. The result feels like a cockeyed and spot-on guided tour through our entire-lives-flashing-before-our-eyes, as entertaining as it is disquieting, as dreamy as it is terrestrial—and in Kiefer’s universe, these reactions are deliciously indistinguishable from one another.”
—Matthew Gavin Frank, author of The Mad Feast and Preparing the Ghost