Vibrant and illuminating, All Times Have Been Modern tells the story of an education of the heart that becomes an education in the world, a story that opens on a summer night on the Kennebecasis River on the day that Kay, its narrator, turns thirteen. Raised in a house filled with the paintings and masks made by her parents and their bohemian friends, Kay sells a silver bowl to Alexander Oleski, a Polish émigré she meets the summer she turns twenty. They marry, then travel to Europe, where she writes a slim novel, The Dangerous Meadow, igniting grand dreams for herself as a writer.

But fallow years follow. And when her marriage comes to an end in the 1980s, she moves from Ottawa to Montreal, hoping to escape the debris of past mistakes. But in Montreal the life she has planned for herself—a life dedicated to useful solitude and the demands of art—is interrupted when she begins a relationship with an architect she meets the following spring.

Liberating, unpredictable, All Times Have Been Modern is a virtuoso novel that offers readers a powerful critique of the sentimental pieties of the conventional love story. As it explores the confounding ways that life and fiction can collide and overlap, it also raises questions about the conflicts between love and identity, intimacy and solitude, emotional intensity and what endures.

     A soldier comes to stand next to me as we make a wide swing away from the dock. He doesn’t speak, he only squints out at the river as if he’s spent years under orders to squint out at rivers. It isn’t until we’ve sailed past the first island that he asks me to light his cigarette for him. But it’s too windy out on the water, a big wind keeps blowing my hair across my eyes as I’m pretending to watch the mainland rising and falling and when I turn to glance back at him I try to make my eyes look intolerably sad. Tragic, even. Tragic with the knowledge that I have already lived an important and sorrowful life.
     No, I tell him.
     Why not?
     Because I don’t want to.
     Why don’t you want to?
     Because I just don’t. Why can’t you light it yourself?
     When he sets his hands on my hips so he can squeeze past me to stand on my opposite side, I get an attack of the shivers from the quick dents his cold fingers make on the bare skin between my sun halter and bathing-suit bottoms. But I try to look unimpressed: it’s the night I’ve turned thirteen, after all, it’s even almost the exact mid-point of the twentieth century, and I have a book with me, a birthday gift called The Thirty-nine Steps that’s so exciting I feel sick to my stomach from my need to reach the end of it before it gets dark. My parents are also parked in the first car, just behind where I’m looking back at Kennebecasis Island. But even though I’m feeling too chilled (in a hot-faced way) I don’t want to go back to the car for my sweater because I don’t want the soldier to think I’m upset.
     “At least tell me your name.”
     “It’s Kay.”
     “Oh Kay,” he moans. “So why won’t you light my cigarette for me, oh Kay? Okay, Kay?”
     I can’t do it for him. Besides, how can I do it for him when I’ve already told him so many times that I wouldn’t? Because by now I really want to, I want to because I want my mother to see me do it.
     But she might not even be looking and when the lights on the far side of the bay come into view he decides to light his cigarette for himself, then smiles down at me as I close my book. “Leaving me, are you?”
     “Yes.”
     My parents are talking in low voices at the front as I slide onto the back seat and pick up the flashlight, then click it on and begin to read fast, leaping from one moon of words to the next and not looking up till I hear the boat threshing water, then the words get jumped by the jolt of landing as their meanings race past me—I hate this, I hate it almost as much as I hate falling asleep and getting bumped awake as we drive off the boat—but now the words are tipping again as we careen toward Saint John, the city where we’ll be picking up a boy whose mother died three weeks ago, a boy named Derek who’s going to stay with us for the rest of the summer and it’s not fair that my brothers and my sister are away at summer camp and I’m the one who has to entertain him, I might even die myself if I don’t reach the end of the book before we get to where he is, but just as we’re turning onto his street I come to the final word, then we’ve bumped to a stop and we go up the steep steps to a tall house in the floodlit fog of Saint John, the house of Derek’s older sister, Georgia Switzer, a teacher and poet who’s a friend of my mother’s. I always worry that I’ll be expected to say something intelligent to Georgia but will only end up saying something weird and peculiar. She’s also going to be my English teacher when I start high school in the fall. And so it’s going to be awful, going into English will be like walking into a class taught by my mother, and when she opens the door to us her eyes look strange, too bright or too emotional, and she’s not dressed in black as I thought she would be, she’s dressed in three shades of tan—tan turtleneck sweater, darker tan circle skirt, tan ballet slippers—and when she tells Derek to run upstairs for his suitcase I’m surprised that it isn’t gloomy in here, all the lamps are turned on and all the floors shine.
     On the drive home, Derek sits next to me in the back while my mother sits sideways on the front seat so she can talk to us and I’m afraid of what she’s going to say next, her dark-lipsticked smile is so ghastly and friendly. “Tell me, Derek!” she calls back to him. “Do you like to read?”
     “Sometimes.”
     “Kay loves to read!”
     I turn to look out my window, humiliated. It’s as if she has just said, “We have recently discovered that Kay has a most remarkable talent, she knows how to read.” One day last winter she even told a man who came out to visit our workshop in Scanlon Falls that he should go upstairs and entertain me. I was home from school, sick with a cold, and this man, who was very hairy and breathy, came up the stairs to my room. “I’ve been ordered by your mother to entertain you and so I’ve decided to read my poems to you,” he told me, then he sat on the chair next to my bed and for the whole afternoon he read his poetry to me while I kept lying at attention under my quilt hoping I wouldn’t need to tell him that I had to go to the bathroom. I wondered if his poems were bad poems and my mother didn’t know what to say about them and so she sent him upstairs to spend the afternoon with me. But how could I tell if they were good or bad? All I knew was that he kept reading them as if they were hymns and he was singing them without the music. But at the end of each poem he would stop, wait for me to say something, and when I couldn’t think of anything to say he would move on to the next poem.
     My mother is asking Derek if he likes to sing.
     Now he doesn’t answer her. By now he’s probably decided that she’s incurably insane. He might even think I’m the same kind of person she is. But I’ve decided not to even care what he thinks, he’s just a boy. At least the soldier was a grown-up. Or a sort of grown-up.
     “Darling,” my mother is saying to Derek, “you must call me Idona.”
     “Yes,” he says.
     “What about in the car?”
     “Sorry?”
     “Do you like to sing in the car?”
     “I don’t know, I’ve never tried it.”
     “We have a song in our family that we like to sing whenever we’re on our way to Gondola Point. I sing: Here we go to Gondola Point! Then you and Daddy and Kay sing Gone-doe-la-point! Gone-doe-la-point!” She makes her mouth into a tiny “o” as if she’s teaching idiots to sing and after she has sung the opening line she makes an up and down wavy motion with her hand to let us know that we are to follow her, and so we do, we sing in misery and gratitude all the way to Gondola Point.

     My mother has gone to Saint John to see her dentist this afternoon and so I want to find myself a book that’s got love in it. I go down to the bookcase in the sunroom and pull two grey books down from the top shelf, Remembrance of Things Past, Volumes One and Two, then decide on Volume Two because I like the titles of the smaller books it contains: Cities of the Plain, The Captive, The Sweet Cheat Gone, The Past Recaptured, and now that I’ve decided on it, all I want to do is spend the afternoon reading it while no one can bother me. But on my way up to my room a door above me creaks to click shut. I know it’s the door of the bedroom belonging to Derek for the summer and I know this because on this particular afternoon we’re the only ones at home. I walk past his door and go into my room, close my own door, then sit at my desk like a student about to begin a history assignment. I used to look at books that were filled with pictures of gardens before I went to bed at night, or read mystery stories, but ever since school got out I’ve been reading books about nurses or horses and in one of these books a nurse even owned a horse and I’m hoping there’ll be a horse in this book too. Or a man on a horse, a handsome dark man riding on horseback and seeing, across a vast plain, a golden city. Instead, I find myself making my way through a thicket of difficult words and French names (campanile, Marquis de Frécourt) and there’s a boy who seems to be close to my own age although he has a much larger vocabulary—but then he’s French—and this boy is spying on two men (a baron and a tailor) by peeking between the slats of a pair of shutters, and now here’s a description of the tailor, a man who has “placed his hand with a grotesque impertinence on his hip, stuck out his behind, posed himself with the coquetry that the orchid might have adopted on the providential arrival of the bee.…” I feel a throb of excitement on reading this, I so much love to spy on people, and the sticking out of his behind fascinates me too, it reminds me of certain childhood games that I used to think were really bad, and after the two men have gone into the tailor’s shop and closed the door I race on ahead, rushing through the boy’s plan to eavesdrop by passing through a kitchen to descend a service stair so he can hurry under the breadth of the courtyard to the place where there’s a stairway up into a room next door to the tailor’s shop. But then he changes his mind and instead reaches the shop by a more public and quicker route, and now he’s already here and overhearing (from behind a partition) what sounds like one person strangling another at close range, a sound that makes me start to tick even though I’m still seated at my desk, a sound that turns me into a ticking little time-bomb reading a book, I’m sexually ticking, regular ticks and then a series of throbs, and now and then I feel the need to shrug sideways and squirm a little in my chair, then I feel the need to shrug sideways in the opposite direction, then squirm in my chair again. It has something to do with the kind of afternoon it is too, it’s such a muggy afternoon after a morning of rain, but then there’s a conversation between the baron and the tailor that’s very dull and so I close the book and step out of my jeans, then pull on a pair of shorts that are a little too tight for me because I want to go down to the back of the house and sit on the lawn.
     I go down and out, let the back door slam behind me, then sit down on a damp patch of lawn and lean back, braced by my hands. I draw up a leg, then let it down to draw up the other leg and toss back my hair. But it starts to feel too weird to be on display especially since I don’t know if Derek is even bothering to look and so I stand up to slap at the bits of grass that have attached themselves to the back of my shorts and it’s while I’m hitting at myself that a whistle—thrilling, piercing, sure of itself, male—comes down from above. I don’t need to look up, I know who is whistling. I’ve also seen older girls at school act aloof when they are being whistled at and so I decide to act aloof too. A-loof: I like the word, but once I’ve stepped into the cool of the house again, there’s nothing I can think of that I want to do. I walk my fingers past books whose titles make me think of books for babies in kindergarten (The Book of Small, Growing Pains, The House of All Sorts), then pick up a pair of ivory chopsticks and begin to hit at things as I go from room to room, a ping to a windowpane here, two clicks each to two glass candlesticks there, do a sweep down the piano keys with all my fingers, then go back to the bookcase where I consider reading A Town like Alice again because I love it so. But I’ve already read it six times and have actually read the best part of it at least twenty times, the part just after World War II where Jean, the brave former prisoner of the Japanese in Malaya, meets the Australian soldier who survived being nailed to a tree for the crime of stealing chickens for her while she was on a forced march around Malaya with a convoy of British women, the part after the war where he’s too shy and polite to her until they make a trip to an island off the coast of Australia and go swimming in the sea and Jean can see how wrecked the skin on his back looks because he was tortured for her sake. This is when she gets the inspiration to go back to her cabin and braid her hair into a single braid, then wrap her Malayan sarong around herself and walk barefoot out to where he’s waiting for her. This is the best part because this is when she places her hands on his shoulders to say, “Is this bettah, Joe?” This is when he kisses and kisses her, then carries her in his arms into her tourist hut where her sarong keeps unwrapping itself even though she keeps trying to hold it pulled up over her breasts as she says, “Dear Joe, if you can’t wait until we get married, it’s really all right.”
     I would like to try this, I would like to lie down on my bed and wrap my nightgown sideways around myself like a bulky sarong and roll over behind my pillow and place my hands on its shoulders to whisper, “Is this bettah, Joe?”
     But then I get an inspiration too, I’ll ask Derek to play Scrabble with me, I should be kind to him, his mother just died a few weeks ago, and so I get out the box of letter tiles and go up the stairs holding the Scrabble board pressed to me like a school book.
     Music is coming from his room when I knock on his door. The squeak of bedsprings comes next, then the sound of hopping on one foot, then the hops of two feet, and when he opens the door he smiles down at the Scrabble board and tells me he knows how to play a much better game.
     “What’s that, then?”
     “Come on in and I’ll show you.…”
     I can smell socks as I step into his room: socks and something else. Cheese, I think, my brothers’ rooms also mostly smell of cheese, then he’s saying that the first rule of this game is that he’s going to think of a number and I have to guess what it is.
     I glance over at his bed, his blue pillow slips. “Nine,” I say.
     His shorts seem to be breathing all on their own. “That was close,” he tells me. “And so I’m going to have to give you one more chance.”
     Of course the whole point is to guess wrong. Even I know that. You win by losing. I think of older girls at school saying to boys in grade twelve, “See you tomorrow,” and the boys in grade twelve tilting back in their chairs to say, “Is that a threat or a promise?”
     “Fourteen hundred and ninety-two.”
     “Closer. But that’s not it either.”
     “If nine is close, how can fourteen hundred and ninety-two be even closer? It doesn’t even make any sense.”
     “It’s true,” he says, smiling down at me. “It’s a great mystery.” He’s still watching me, though, in a thinking sort of way and so I’m not all that surprised when he shoves me (but only as if it’s a joke) against the wall by his door, then taps me on a shoulder.      
     “Rule number two: You have to hit my hand away.”
     When I lightly push at it, he touches my left elbow.
     And so I touch one of his shoulders.
     At this he sets his hands on my hips. But this time, instead of batting him away, I pout up at him, feeling plump in every part of my body. His hand drops lower down then and begins to rub at me in a way that makes me feel a sensation of such secret happiness that even though he’s the one who’s giving it to me he also seems to be the one who’s standing in the way of it, it feels too private to have anyone else see it as taunts from my childhood keep singing themselves inside my head. So make me then. So I bet you wouldn’t dare to. So I dare you. And by the time his hand has done whatever he’s doing to me for however long we’ve imagined it will take for my mother’s appointment at the dentist’s to be over, I feel drunk, I’m ten thousand times more drunk than any flower after a visit from any baron or bee, then he’s starting to walk me backwards toward his bed—and I want him to, I want to go wherever his guiding hand pushes me but at the same time I’m worried that once we’re lying down I won’t know what to do with my own hands—when we hear the warning gouge of tires in gravel followed by the slam of a car door and the tinier gouge of high heels walking fast across the wet yard of pebbles, then the dangerously innocent but also dangerously probing voice calling up the stairs: “Hullo, hullo!” And so I’m sure that my mother must know, I’m sure she knows everything. And besides, Derek is talking to me, he’s saying in a low voice, “Go to your room now, hurry …” and so I do go, but my heart is by now violently beating down where the ticking was and I’m feeling furious because we were interrupted and so I thrash around on my bed trying to make one of my hands be Derek’s hand, but it’s too small (and it’s also too much mine) and when he doesn’t come down to join the family for dinner and my sunburned father asks me if I know where he is, I can feel a cooler glance fall on me from the far end of the table as I say no. A glance on the lookout for some new slant in my gaze, in the way I’m holding my spoon. But when my immediate ancestor asks me how I spent my afternoon, I’m able to quite calmly tell her that I spent it reading a book by Marcel Prowst.
     My oldest brother, back from the summer camp where he was the swimming instructor, shouts, “Proost!” While Idona—her lower lip still puffed up from the Novocaine—turns to appeal to our pink father. “Don’t you think that a girl of thirteen is too young to be reading Proust?”

"Elisabeth Harvor has produced a body of fiction that is crystal clear, poetic, and courageous. A beautiful writer who doesn't shy from ugly truths, she explores the near limits of desperation and the far fields of childhood in work that is fresh, uncomfortable and risky. In the process, she has become a master at charting the movement from innocence to experience..."—Terry Griggs, Elizabeth Hay, and Alistair MacLeod, the jury for the 2003 Marian Engel Award

"All Times Have Been Modern is a brilliant novel... [Harvor's] voice is poetic--but in the most unselfconscious way. She never strains for profound metaphors. There is only Kay's authentic, individual, slightly kooky, way of seeing....[I]f I was going to compare this novel to any other, it would be Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. As in Lessing's novel, Harvor explores the social and pyschological blocks that hinder a woman's creativity....But that's as far as I would take the analogy. Harvor's style is completely her own and makes her one of the most eloquent and entertaining writers in Canada today."--National Post

"In her second novel, All Times Have Been Modern, Elisabeth Harvor moves through time and space with the ease of a trapeze artist...Harvor is a master at evoking intimacy with small details, like Kay's description of 'the tiny glisten of sound his mouth makes when he smiles in the dark.'...Harvor reveals in her precise, poetic prose how art, like life and love, is all about process."--NOW magazine

"All Times Have Been Modern is a remarkable novel: fiercely intelligent, fiercely perceptive, and fiercely funny. All of the tender and absurd minutiae of love are revealed, right down to the little cracking sound of the lover's smile in the dark."—Nadine McInnis, author of Quicksilver

"In All Times Have Been Modern, Harvor navigates through memory, obsession, and the perplexities of attraction with a wry lucidity that is startling in its honesty. Her rueful glances at the lives of her characters are always cleverly nuanced and always perfectly positioned."—Rabindranath Maharaj, author of The Lagahoo's Apprentice

"There are few writers writing today who can equal Harvor's precision of language and subtlety of observation. Above all, I admire her work for its quality of intimacy, or surrender..."—Nino Ricci, author of Testament