Book Review: All the Time There Is

celebrating Pride Month 2020

Book Review: 'All the Time There Is' by Toby Stein

4 / 5 Stars

Here at the PorPor Books Blog, we like to celebrate Pride Month by highlighting a fiction or nonfiction book that illuminates the LGBTQ Experience. 

For June 2020, our selection is 'All the Time There Is', a novel by Toby Stein.

‘All the Time There Is’ (213 pp) first was published in hardback in 1977; this mass-market paperback edition was published by Bantam Books in July 1978.

I couldn’t find much information about Toby Stein, save that she was born in New York City in 1935, studied history, and was living in New Jersey at the time she wrote ‘All the Time There Is’. Stein published another romance novel, ‘Only the Best’, in 1984.

‘All the Time There Is’ takes place in New York City in the late 70s. The first person narrator is Anne Durham, a 43 year-old widowed for the past 11 years (her husband dropped dead of a heart attack). Anne lives in a nice apartment building in Manhattan, and works as a clerk in a shoppe that sells antique silverware. Aside from her daughter Alex, who always is trying to fix her mother up with one middle-aged man after another, Anne has few personal connections, but remains content with the single life.

Living across the hall from Anne are Charles Robinson, a well-comported man in his late thirties, and his ‘roommate’, a younger man named Raymond Elliott. Anne maintains a cordial relationship with both men.

Within the opening chapters, Raymond dies, and Anne can’t help but notice that Charles, as an outcast from society, is obliged to grieve alone. Moved to compassion, Anne decides to bake and deliver, in person, a chocolate cake to Charles. This starts a friendship that grows as Spring in the city turns into Summer, and then early Fall. 

Whenever one of the middle-aged men that Anne dates turns out to be a self-centered pig, she turns to the understanding Charles for companionship and consolation. And whenever one of Charles’s bleached-blond surfer-boy hustlers dismisses him as an aging Queen, Anne is there to provide comfort and consolation in equal measure.

Anne realizes that Charles is affectionate, sensitive, empathic, cultured, and sweet. Could it be that she has more than just friendly feelings for Charles ? And if she does………what will it take to persuade him to Switch Sides……..?!

‘All the Time There Is’ is a quick and entertaining read, and very much a product of its time and place. So, I would caution against dismissing it as another example of the wish-fulfillment genre of romance novels in which a bourgeoise white woman heroine finds true love with someone who is Different.

‘All the Time There Is’ does succeed as a portrait of New York City in the late 70s and how, even as the city was sinking into decay, the members of its upper-crust white society persisted in their rituals of regularly attending classical music concerts, doing the New York Times crossword puzzle, dining at fine restaurants, patronizing the Film Festival at Lincoln Center, strolling through Chinatown, and going for walks in evening twilight. There is an awareness that things are not right in the city - Anne refuses to walk home alone, after dark - but the lead characters are blissfully unaware of the fact that their city is turning into a crime-infested hellhole.

Summing up, ‘All the Time There Is’ is a reasonably interesting novel and while I can't say it's worth searching out, if you see it on a store shelf it might be worth picking up.