WORDS: Heather Keane and Benedict Shegog

Time’s Laughingstocks takes its epigraphs from both the Victorian realist Thomas Hardy and the wise-cracking comedian Groucho Marx. This dichotomy will prepare the reader well for Steve Gronert Ellerhoff’s debut novel, one which deals simultaneously with the hilarities of childhood and the weight of adult unhappiness. One of our protagonists, Richie, is a pre-teen living the trying life of a dinosaur geek in the early 90s. Another is Dick, Richie’s forty-plus adult self, who has forgone dinosaurs for temporal physics and created the world’s first, heavily copyrighted, time machine. The pair of selves meet when Dick travels back in time to scare off some kids who have instructed our overweight mini-palaeontologist to “eat shit and die”. Witness to all of this, and reluctant team member for the ensuing tour of time, is Virgil, the actor about to — or already has, depending on which time you’re looking at it from — play the lead in the biopic of Dr. Dick’s life. Dick has seen the film and has some judgements about it, so he takes the pair on a trip through time. While Richie is immediately upset that he won’t bring himself to see the dinosaurs, tension simmers while they rack up time-miles and he watches the ageing scientist’s bitterness over past events canker.

Gronert Ellerhoff’s writing is hugely entertaining, even when describing the odious scientist’s tragic personal failings. Such a unique plot and uplifting style seem like they might be typical of the author when one hears the backstory of the novel. Gronert Ellerhoff says the book was conceived while staying in the childhood bedroom of a friend he was visiting in England. An Iowan originally, Gronert Ellerhoff returned home and would end up finding work in another unusual creative atmosphere: a toy shop in Portland, Oregon where he remained for five years.

“I became the director of wind-up toys. I had a counter at the back of the store; it was an old store, independently run, sort of styled on European models, so you had a lot of wooden toys. I would just sit at the counter, pretending to work, and write. That’s where it happened.”

Gronert Ellerhoff would go on to self-publish the novel after refusing publisher’s demands to box the novel into specific reading age-groups, and the novel is not exclusively for older or younger readers. tn2 asked if he had a tendency to write for or about children:

“I guess so. The stories that I’ve always really loved have been the ones that appealed to me when I was a kid. I remember aspects of being twelve and I think that twelve year-olds might enjoy the book. I’m really self-conscious about how the book opens, how the character is bullied; I’m self conscious about how he’s treated. I remember the way kids talk. A lot of that stuff about him getting treated so poorly comes from an incident when I was thirteen and I got the snot beaten out of me. I think that’s okay too, I think it’s good to let young people know that you had the snot kicked out of you, to let them know that that happened to you. I also think what happens when his future self comes back to exact some kind of revenge is a horrible method to deal with it. He’s got a vindictive streak and I don’t think that’s healthy. Would people do stuff like that if they could?”

Time’s Laughingstocks draws on aspects of children’s fiction (the book comes with stunning full page illustrations from the British artist Kevin Storrar), but the novel quickly skews this familiar form into something much more original. Despite the temporally and geographically wide ranging setting (which careers from the 90s, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, a 2025 Iowa and the last Ice Age) it is the characters and the relationship between Richie and his older self that are the most striking part of the novel. Decades of sci-fi have made the dangers of interacting with your past self common knowledge, but Gronert Ellerhoff sidesteps this problem by completely ignoring it: “When I got the idea, I was like, ‘Why can’t you ever meet yourself? That’s dumb.”’ As a result the reader sees Richie’s increasingly unimpressed view of his embittered and bullying self who obsessively chases through time those who’ve wronged him in the past.

A plot which intricately works in so many selves, conflicts and ages cannot be simply summarised. Faced with the big question, Gronert Ellerhoff looked slightly bemused.

“What is it about? I guess for me it’s — it’s all very clichéd stuff — something about how it’s important to keep yourself in the present as best you can because living in the past is an impediment to your life. At the same time, living with expectations of the future is just as bad. And there’s something about being careful about what you grow up to become. I think the main character, when he’s growing up, exhibits bitterness and spite and self-righteousness. And I think his younger self is horrified to find these qualities fully developed in his adult self. I think that’s what the book is about. All that cliché stuff. There’s a part at the end where Richie tells his mom, ‘I don’t wanna learn anything about temporal physics ever.’ Some people would read that and call me an intellectual asshole, bastard, humanities corner, not realising what science is even about. But to them I would say; ‘Damn straight!’ because what’s all that stuff if you’re not going to behave in a humane way? If you’re not going to use it for humane means? It’s just awful, that’s what it is. And being humane isn’t something you become when you grow up, it’s something you have to work on every day.”

Time’s Laughingstocks, then, is definitely much more than your average sci-fi adventure. Gronert Ellerhoff’s debut is a wonderfully original look at the problems of self-fulfillment and self-evaluation and while the author may label these cruxes as clichéd,, Dr. Dick Rex’s tour through time is delightfully novel.