Sasha Stone, a film industry critic and chief of the popular film awards website Awards Daily found herself transfixed by John Nolte’s new novel, Borrowed Time, an adventure she calls an “American masterpiece.”
Stone, who has worked as a journalist for such publications as Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Wrap, posted her review of Nolte’s novel at her “Free Thinking” Substack, in which she writes: “John Nolte’s debut novel about love, immortality and faith is a winner.”
Stone, who describes herself as a “former Democrat and Leftist who escaped the bubble to get to know the other side of the country and to take a more critical look at the left,” noted that Nolte’s novel is not a “right-wing political screed,” but is instead a novel “about love, immortality and faith.”
She found herself transfixed by Nolte’s story and insisted that the work was a “distant call from the past, back to the days when stories were meant for everyone when we would all share the plight of characters so real we could almost reach out and touch them.”
“Nolte has said he didn’t want to write anything political. It’s not a seething indictment of the Left (although if you read between the lines…) or ‘cancel culture’ or anything like that. Its value is that it exists far outside the squabbling of our daily lives,” Stone writes.
Indeed, Stone told her readers that she rarely bothers with literary fiction anymore because they are all so textbook, rote, left-leaning screeds that have jettisoned telling a story in favor of pushing a narrative and bending every character and every scene to that agenda. However, Nolte’s novel is not patterned as just a political mirror image of the currently “approved” left-wing template being published these days.
“Borrowed Time is a love story. It’s a horror story. It’s a near-future, dystopian fiction story. It’s as much about Nolte himself as it is about our modern world. It is about his peculiar perspective as an outsider observing every horrible and great thing humans have manifested. And it is about faith,” Stone gushed.
“It is as grotesque at times as it is tender. It is horrific, and it is beautiful. It dwells in that binary as a story about the good vs. evil in our world and ourselves,” she said. “It is a book for everyone, not just a select few.”
“But ultimately, this is a human story. If you are uncomfortable with religion, parts of it might not resonate. And, if you aren’t comfortable with graphic depictions of violence or curse words, you might have a tough time getting through some of it,” she wrote.
Stone said she felt “safe” in Nolte’s hands as a writer: “It’s one of those books that expands outward as it goes along, from the desert to Washington DC, from the past all the way into the future. It tells us what is eternal and what is only fashionable for a moment. ”
“Borrowed Time soothed my aching heart in many ways,” she exclaimed. “It made me think about the things that really matter in life and the things that don’t. It made me think about true love, about finding one person to spend your life with – something that has always (and probably will always) eluded me. And it made me think about death, about why we need to believe there is a hereafter because, without it, life becomes unbearable.”
“What you take away from it will depend on what you believe about your own fate… I highly recommend Borrowed Time,” Stone concluded.
You can buy Borrowed Time for your collection here, or the audiobook here.
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