Time's Fool

About the Book

Told through journal entries representing four interrelated voices from different generations, Time’s Fool is an intricately crafted novel about the ageless human conflict between flesh and spirit. Its hero is Galton Morrow, who, in 1907, is a middle-aged Progressive physician and venereal disease expert dripping with noblesse oblige and intent on saving the less fortunate souls of Boston from the wages of their ignorance, hypocrisy, and vice. Brought into the world of the past by reading old diaries, Galton discovers that he is not who he thought he was.  Only by piecing together the truths, half-truths, and outright distortions from his long-departed progenitors does Galton come to realize who he actually is.

Galton has always viewed himself as a savior of humanity. Having worked his way up into the best of Boston society—and society wives—he has always prided himself on his unusual, but unquestionably illustrious origins: while to Boston society he may seem to have started out poor and undistinguished, he is actually the son of a scientifically arranged coupling, the result of the pairing of a man and a woman each considered to be a superior specimen of humanity. In fact, Galton is the living product of a scientific breeding experiment (“stirpiculture”) conducted at the Oneida Colony, an unusually successful utopian community played out in upstate New York during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Members of the Oneida Colony lived under a system of communism developed by Christian Perfectionist John Humphrey Noyes that advocated shared property, pleasurable work, and free and open sexual relations—as long as all sexual “couplings” were arranged and approved by community leaders, particularly Noyes himself. The Oneida residents also instituted a system of human eugenics in which people would be “bred like racehorses” to produce human beings superior in body, mind, and spirit.  

Galton’s knowledge of his noble origins has always fueled his sense of mission, even after his mother died and he was brought to Boston to live with his humble music teacher father and stepmother. Like many of his contemporaries, Galton is a crusader. In particular, he would like to stop the “conspiracy of silence” that keeps men from telling their wives that they have venereal disease and compelling doctors to pretend that the rashes, infertility, blindness, and paralysis of their female patients are due to skin disorders or stress. Together with his comfortable, if passionless and childless, marriage to the socially conscious Mary Elizabeth, this often frustrating mission is usually enough to fulfill him. All this changes, however, when Galton is visited by an engaging and determined young woman named Hope, another descendant of the Oneida Colony. Hope is trying to put together a history of the utopian community and has gathered a number of the many diaries left by her ancestors. She inspires Galton to peruse the diary left by his father Josiah Morrow. In the process of reading and translating the diary, some of which is written in an inscrutable shorthand, Galton discovers evidence confirming what he has secretly suspected since early childhood: Josiah might not be his biological father. While Josiah was officially paired with his mother Marian as part of the stirpiculture program, the diary not only reveals Josiah’s humble origins but also his deep and ongoing love for Lily, a love affair that eventually resulted in the couple’s expulsion from the community. Even more disturbingly, the diary shows no sign that Josiah ever fathered a baby by Marian.

Shamed by his father’s revelations, Galton becomes increasingly obsessed with redeeming his status and identity. With his sense of self at stake, he travels to Oneida, where some descendants continue to live, to look for other evidence of his origins. With Hope’s help, he ends up loca

About the Author

Terra Ziporyn is an award-winning medical writer, editor, and historian whose books include The Harvard Guide to Women’s Health and Alternative Medicine For Dummies. A closet fiction writer since childhood, she is always at work on a new novel or play and is currently an active member of the New Tuners Musical Theatre Workshop.