“I love this book, and more importantly I love Tom Spanbauer, he is inventive original and one of the most talented authors I’ve come across. The story of Rigby John is the story of a young man’s transformation, of his finding and losing himself, sometimes all in the same day. It is a story about reconciliation, about family bonds and the need to break free. It is rich with knowing—the prose is deft, funny, heartbreaking and the story stays with you long after the last page is turned.”
A.M. Homes, author of This Book Will Save Your Life
“In Tom Spanbauer’s Now Is the Hour, white small-town America gets its cherry busted in an orgy of cigarette smoke and racism.”
Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club
The year is 1967, and Rigby John Klusener, seventeen years old and finally leaving his home and family in Pocatello, Idaho, is on the highway with his thumb out and a flower behind his ear, headed for San Francisco. Now Is the Hour is the wondrous story of how Rigby John got to this point.
It traces his gradual emancipation from the repressions of a strictly religious farming family and from the small-minded, bigoted community in which he has grown up, during a time of explosive cultural change. Transforming this familiar journey from American Graffiti to On the Road to something rich and strange and hilarious is the persona of Rigby John himself. Intimately in touch with his fears, hesitantly awakening to his own sexuality, and palpably open to life's mysteries, Rigby John is a protagonist whom readers will fall in love with, root for, and be moved by.
