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Take Me Where the Good Times Are
Seventy isn't old. Not if you are Thomas ("Everybody Calls Me Tommy") Bartin, a first-rate combmaker for forty-five years. Not if you're always cheerful, with a nice compliment for everybody, can look after yourself proper, and have lots of friends to share an evening's beer with. And the poorhouse is no place for you—even if you call it The Monument City Infirmary or The Place.
Seventy isn't old—and to be as young as you feel, all you need is to be Tommy Bartin, to get away from The Place, and to head downtown where the good times are.
Tommy gets a bit of money—sixty-three dollars—as a gift and legacy from a fellow inmate, and he gets his chance to go downtown on the eve of Memorial Day. Around his downtown adventures, as told in Tommy's own lively and authentic voice, Robert Cormier spins a touching, funny, and honest tale of an old man who has a lot of growing up to do. And through this loving story, Cormier questions our euphemistic times—when you are never old but a Senior Citizen in your Golden Years; when a monthly check and a TV-recreation room are considered satisfactory substitutes for love, self-respect and a rocking chair in the sun on your own front porch.
Stephen Spender has written that the ability to portray a good man convincingly, interestingly, is almost a mark of greatness in fiction. Tommy Bartin is a good man, and a real one, in the pages of Take Me Where the Good Times Are.
Seventy isn't old—and to be as young as you feel, all you need is to be Tommy Bartin, to get away from The Place, and to head downtown where the good times are.
Tommy gets a bit of money—sixty-three dollars—as a gift and legacy from a fellow inmate, and he gets his chance to go downtown on the eve of Memorial Day. Around his downtown adventures, as told in Tommy's own lively and authentic voice, Robert Cormier spins a touching, funny, and honest tale of an old man who has a lot of growing up to do. And through this loving story, Cormier questions our euphemistic times—when you are never old but a Senior Citizen in your Golden Years; when a monthly check and a TV-recreation room are considered satisfactory substitutes for love, self-respect and a rocking chair in the sun on your own front porch.
Stephen Spender has written that the ability to portray a good man convincingly, interestingly, is almost a mark of greatness in fiction. Tommy Bartin is a good man, and a real one, in the pages of Take Me Where the Good Times Are.
- GenresYoung AdultFiction
211 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
About the author
Robert Cormier
55 books638 followersRobert Edmund Cormier (January 17, 1925–November 2, 2000) was an American author, columnist and reporter, known for his deeply pessimistic, downbeat literature. His most popular works include I Am the Cheese, After the First Death, We All Fall Down and The Chocolate War, all of which have won awards. The Chocolate War was challenged in multiple libraries. His books often are concerned with themes such as abuse, mental illness, violence, revenge, betrayal and conspiracy. In most of his novels, the protagonists do not win.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 10, 2019
"A man gets to be a certain age and he knows more dead people than live ones, and there's no good in thinking of them because you can't bring anybody back and memories only make you feel worse."
—Take Me Where the Good Times Are, P. 59
When it was first published in 1965, Take Me Where the Good Times Are was classified exclusively as adult literature. The story's protagonist is seventy years old, after all, and the narrative as told through his point of view deals mostly with adult issues, though not graphically or in a way that would make the book patently inappropriate for younger readers. Interestingly, when the book was republished in 1991 by Random House, it was labeled a young-adult or even children's book, though as far as I'm aware nothing had changed about the story. A big part of the reason for this change in genre may very well have been the success of the young-adult novels that had become author Robert Cormier's exclusive medium following the release of his internationally acclaimed The Chocolate War in 1974; after a number of other engrossing Cormier books hit the shelves over the next couple of decades and significantly altered the face of young-adult literature, younger readers were eager to get their hands on anything that the master from Leominster had written. The first several novels that Robert Cormier had written back in the early 1960s, which were originally intended for an adult audience, now shifted to be considered young-adult fare as they saw republication down through the years. My guess is that the changing age demographic of Robert Cormier's main audience of readers was largely responsible for this.
While Take Me Where the Good Times Are may read very much like an adult book, I can certainly see how it would legitimately qualify as young-adult fare. One of the most important characters in the story is a fourteen-year-old girl often called Annabel Lee, who had been in a traumatic accident when she was younger. As a direct result, her mind remains like that of a very young child, though physically she is growing up and it is apparent that the disconnect between her mind and body will soon spawn some serious problems for her. The general mindset of the main character Tommy Bartin, though he may be a septuagenarian, is like a letter to younger readers sent from the other side of old age, a stage of life which to the rich in youth seems to be the opposite ledge of an impossibly wide canyon that they themselves will never really actually cross. When the entire duration of your life currently consists of fifteen or twenty years, how foreign a concept does fifty years seem? Tommy's way of looking at the world will ring true enough to younger readers to allow them to see for a few moments the view from that opposite ledge of the canyon, and to consider that maybe the years sneak by faster than we might expect. Tommy may have seven decades under his belt, but his hopes and goals really aren't all that different from those of most teenagers. Herein lies the most germane young-adult value of Take Me Where the Good Times Are.
The book begins at a center for the elderly, which Tommy Bartin refers to unhappily as The Infirmary, or The Place. Tommy is only seventy years old, but a severe bout with gallstones in the recent past has rendered him unable to work at the comb shop that had provided him with employment for more than forty years, or even to live on his own anymore, at least for a while. The Place isn't terrible and Tommy has his own group of what could be termed "friends" living there with him, but as his essential strength returns he more and more often finds himself wishing for a renaissance of the bygone days of his youth, when life was good and he was a strong young man with friends all over town.
When circumstances suddenly align for Tommy to leave The Place and strike out on his own, he doesn't let the opportunity slip away. He backtracks to all of his old haunts around town, on the lookout for old friends while seeing how much of his former life he might be able to scare up for one weekend of adventure. Nothing seems to be quite the way he remembered it, though; his closest friends have either died, moved away, taken up new interests and forgotten about him, or aren't quite all there mentally due to some misfortune in their life that has sapped their contentment and made a mockery out of their current existence. It's sad to watch formerly robust and thriving people whom we liked and admired lose their grip on their health and their sanity, and seeing the frightening personal struggles of people who used to be some of his dearest friends causes a dark cloud of depression to form and hang low over Tommy's mood.
As Tommy explores the old town and looks to recapture even just a small piece of what his life was like in its heyday, he discovers a few things about the nature of life, how at some point as one lives the major losses inevitably seem to start piling up much faster than any compensatory gains meted out to balance the other side of the scales. Tommy may at times seem to have an overly negative view of the world, and I can't say myself that I necessarily agree with all of the philosophical understanding that he comes to accept in this book, but overall I'd have to say that Tommy is just a realist who understands that the good times simply aren't there to be had for him anymore in the exact way that he remembers them, and if he wants to still have positive experiences in his future years on earth then he'll have to change some of his fundamental expectations of himself and other people, and be willing to accept a different sort of lifestyle as still being the Good Life.
No matter what the subject, Robert Cormier always has important things to say in any book that he writes, and Take Me Where the Good Times Are is no exception. It's a story for all ages that will definitely keep you thinking on a deep level, and there are a few small hints of that classic Robert Cormier intensity that burns so fiercely in his later novels. All in all, I would probably give this book two and a half stars.
—Take Me Where the Good Times Are, P. 59
When it was first published in 1965, Take Me Where the Good Times Are was classified exclusively as adult literature. The story's protagonist is seventy years old, after all, and the narrative as told through his point of view deals mostly with adult issues, though not graphically or in a way that would make the book patently inappropriate for younger readers. Interestingly, when the book was republished in 1991 by Random House, it was labeled a young-adult or even children's book, though as far as I'm aware nothing had changed about the story. A big part of the reason for this change in genre may very well have been the success of the young-adult novels that had become author Robert Cormier's exclusive medium following the release of his internationally acclaimed The Chocolate War in 1974; after a number of other engrossing Cormier books hit the shelves over the next couple of decades and significantly altered the face of young-adult literature, younger readers were eager to get their hands on anything that the master from Leominster had written. The first several novels that Robert Cormier had written back in the early 1960s, which were originally intended for an adult audience, now shifted to be considered young-adult fare as they saw republication down through the years. My guess is that the changing age demographic of Robert Cormier's main audience of readers was largely responsible for this.
While Take Me Where the Good Times Are may read very much like an adult book, I can certainly see how it would legitimately qualify as young-adult fare. One of the most important characters in the story is a fourteen-year-old girl often called Annabel Lee, who had been in a traumatic accident when she was younger. As a direct result, her mind remains like that of a very young child, though physically she is growing up and it is apparent that the disconnect between her mind and body will soon spawn some serious problems for her. The general mindset of the main character Tommy Bartin, though he may be a septuagenarian, is like a letter to younger readers sent from the other side of old age, a stage of life which to the rich in youth seems to be the opposite ledge of an impossibly wide canyon that they themselves will never really actually cross. When the entire duration of your life currently consists of fifteen or twenty years, how foreign a concept does fifty years seem? Tommy's way of looking at the world will ring true enough to younger readers to allow them to see for a few moments the view from that opposite ledge of the canyon, and to consider that maybe the years sneak by faster than we might expect. Tommy may have seven decades under his belt, but his hopes and goals really aren't all that different from those of most teenagers. Herein lies the most germane young-adult value of Take Me Where the Good Times Are.
The book begins at a center for the elderly, which Tommy Bartin refers to unhappily as The Infirmary, or The Place. Tommy is only seventy years old, but a severe bout with gallstones in the recent past has rendered him unable to work at the comb shop that had provided him with employment for more than forty years, or even to live on his own anymore, at least for a while. The Place isn't terrible and Tommy has his own group of what could be termed "friends" living there with him, but as his essential strength returns he more and more often finds himself wishing for a renaissance of the bygone days of his youth, when life was good and he was a strong young man with friends all over town.
When circumstances suddenly align for Tommy to leave The Place and strike out on his own, he doesn't let the opportunity slip away. He backtracks to all of his old haunts around town, on the lookout for old friends while seeing how much of his former life he might be able to scare up for one weekend of adventure. Nothing seems to be quite the way he remembered it, though; his closest friends have either died, moved away, taken up new interests and forgotten about him, or aren't quite all there mentally due to some misfortune in their life that has sapped their contentment and made a mockery out of their current existence. It's sad to watch formerly robust and thriving people whom we liked and admired lose their grip on their health and their sanity, and seeing the frightening personal struggles of people who used to be some of his dearest friends causes a dark cloud of depression to form and hang low over Tommy's mood.
As Tommy explores the old town and looks to recapture even just a small piece of what his life was like in its heyday, he discovers a few things about the nature of life, how at some point as one lives the major losses inevitably seem to start piling up much faster than any compensatory gains meted out to balance the other side of the scales. Tommy may at times seem to have an overly negative view of the world, and I can't say myself that I necessarily agree with all of the philosophical understanding that he comes to accept in this book, but overall I'd have to say that Tommy is just a realist who understands that the good times simply aren't there to be had for him anymore in the exact way that he remembers them, and if he wants to still have positive experiences in his future years on earth then he'll have to change some of his fundamental expectations of himself and other people, and be willing to accept a different sort of lifestyle as still being the Good Life.
No matter what the subject, Robert Cormier always has important things to say in any book that he writes, and Take Me Where the Good Times Are is no exception. It's a story for all ages that will definitely keep you thinking on a deep level, and there are a few small hints of that classic Robert Cormier intensity that burns so fiercely in his later novels. All in all, I would probably give this book two and a half stars.
December 3, 2009
This book completely defied my expectations in every way. I expected it to be a heartwarming piece of fluff, probably because of the little sentence on the cover saying something like, "there's no such thing as being old when you're young at heart" but was I wrong! I probably should have expected it, I mean, Robert Cormier writing a heartwarming piece of fluff? Seems very unlikely. And yet, I loved this book!
*spoilers start now* Tommy is seventy and lives at some sort of nursing home for poor people, and when a lady there dies, she gives him 63 dollars. Tommy decides to go off into town and leave the nursing home forever with the money. Reading about old people depresses me, so I almost stopped reading this book. But I kept reading, probably because of the narrator, Tommy. Tommy is so real, he's so well meaning but helpless, so friendly but naive. So Tommy's walking around town, and he's looking for his old friends, but most of them are dead. Eventually he finds one of his friends, Baptiste. They talk and Baptiste suddenly runs off. Tommy follows him, and finds out that Baptiste lives in an apartment with hundreds of dolls. This really creeped me out, and in my opinion this is when the book really started to get good. Baptiste tells Tommy not to tell anyone about the dolls, and Tommy leaves without really reassuring him. After this, Tommy gets some whiskey and proceeds to get very, very drunk. He goes to this meeting for old people called the Happy Timers, even though alcohol is not allowed there. An old friend who's running the meeting recognizes him there and tells him to get up on stage and tell everyone a poem, but, of course, Tommy is very drunk and embarrasses himself in front of everyone. His friends are all mad at him, and Tommy leaves. Then he finds out that Baptiste slit his wrists.
There is a parallel plot to this book where Tommy's friend Annie, who he calls Annabel Lee, goes missing. Annie is fourteen but has the brain of an eight year old, due to a car accident. Her father works at the nursing home. Some motorcyclists picked her up and basically molested her, and when her father finds her she is completely shattered. Tommy wants to find the motorcyclists to make them pay (he's seventy, and they're like, twenty!) so he goes to a strip club in order to find them. He finds them, and the ringleader sweet-talks Tommy into thinking he's a good guy who didn't mean any harm to Annie, and Tommy believes him! Then the ringleader offers to buy Tommy a drink and Tommy accepts, thinking he can talk to the gang and make them change their ways. But the motorcyclists put a drug in the drink, and Tommy passes out. He wakes up on top of the statue that is being unveiled the next morning. Unfortunately, when he wakes, it is the next morning, so he makes even more of a fool of himself! In the end he goes back to the nursing home.
*end of spoilers* Why did I like this utterly demoralizing book? Perhaps it’s the way Tommy always believes the best in everyone, the way he’s so innocent even at seventy. I think I enjoyed it so much in part because of the depressing things that happen, because I’m morbid like that, and in part because of the wry humor that Cormier injects into parts of the story. I laughed at the part where Tommy trusts the motorcyclists, because he’s so, completely, stupid! Now that I think of it, this book reminds me of the series of unfortunate events, although it’s admittedly less funny. It never ends up as hopeless and awful as the Jungle. And because of that, I loved “Take me where the good times are”.
*spoilers start now* Tommy is seventy and lives at some sort of nursing home for poor people, and when a lady there dies, she gives him 63 dollars. Tommy decides to go off into town and leave the nursing home forever with the money. Reading about old people depresses me, so I almost stopped reading this book. But I kept reading, probably because of the narrator, Tommy. Tommy is so real, he's so well meaning but helpless, so friendly but naive. So Tommy's walking around town, and he's looking for his old friends, but most of them are dead. Eventually he finds one of his friends, Baptiste. They talk and Baptiste suddenly runs off. Tommy follows him, and finds out that Baptiste lives in an apartment with hundreds of dolls. This really creeped me out, and in my opinion this is when the book really started to get good. Baptiste tells Tommy not to tell anyone about the dolls, and Tommy leaves without really reassuring him. After this, Tommy gets some whiskey and proceeds to get very, very drunk. He goes to this meeting for old people called the Happy Timers, even though alcohol is not allowed there. An old friend who's running the meeting recognizes him there and tells him to get up on stage and tell everyone a poem, but, of course, Tommy is very drunk and embarrasses himself in front of everyone. His friends are all mad at him, and Tommy leaves. Then he finds out that Baptiste slit his wrists.
There is a parallel plot to this book where Tommy's friend Annie, who he calls Annabel Lee, goes missing. Annie is fourteen but has the brain of an eight year old, due to a car accident. Her father works at the nursing home. Some motorcyclists picked her up and basically molested her, and when her father finds her she is completely shattered. Tommy wants to find the motorcyclists to make them pay (he's seventy, and they're like, twenty!) so he goes to a strip club in order to find them. He finds them, and the ringleader sweet-talks Tommy into thinking he's a good guy who didn't mean any harm to Annie, and Tommy believes him! Then the ringleader offers to buy Tommy a drink and Tommy accepts, thinking he can talk to the gang and make them change their ways. But the motorcyclists put a drug in the drink, and Tommy passes out. He wakes up on top of the statue that is being unveiled the next morning. Unfortunately, when he wakes, it is the next morning, so he makes even more of a fool of himself! In the end he goes back to the nursing home.
*end of spoilers* Why did I like this utterly demoralizing book? Perhaps it’s the way Tommy always believes the best in everyone, the way he’s so innocent even at seventy. I think I enjoyed it so much in part because of the depressing things that happen, because I’m morbid like that, and in part because of the wry humor that Cormier injects into parts of the story. I laughed at the part where Tommy trusts the motorcyclists, because he’s so, completely, stupid! Now that I think of it, this book reminds me of the series of unfortunate events, although it’s admittedly less funny. It never ends up as hopeless and awful as the Jungle. And because of that, I loved “Take me where the good times are”.
July 5, 2015
Tommy lives in an old folks home (the "Place"), always pining for downtown, where the good times are. Told from the first person, the reader can't help but wonder why he's stuck in this infirmary. You feel he's making the right choice when he leaves for downtown, cheering him on to make a fresh start. But then, in Cormier's subtle way, you slowly become aware of how and why Tommy ended up at the Place. Working in a library, I can see how some of our "special" patrons must be so sure that they are acting rationally, as we initially believe Tommy is. Tommy's evening is like watching a Don Quixote.
December 6, 2013
Well-written, but if Cormier wasn't depressed when he wrote this, he was by the time he finished it. The protagonist is a 70-yr old man, Tommy, who has always believed he is only as young as he feels, and lives with the hope of leaving the infirmary soon, to work in the "real" world again. He gets a chance to walk away from his routine life of 3 yrs and head downtown, with the cash in his pocket looking for the "good times" of his yesteryears and after many mis-adventures, comes to appreciate his quiet life in the infirmary and to the realization that his original belief in inner youth is a myth. Very depressing.
February 20, 2017
Months after having read this, what sticks with me is the tangible sense of desperation. Tommy is determined to recapture the life he once knew, and unwilling to accept that "you can't go home again." He faces a seemingly endless sequence of painful and humiliating events, and my heart broke along with his.
March 15, 2026
I love Robert Cormier. You can't spell emo goth with most of Robert Cormier's books suiting your mood.
This one is no different, even though it's about a dude in his 70s trying to recapture something of his lost life. And the life he was forced to leave behind was so small, it is a matter of heartbreak that even that is too much to ask of the universe. I tell you what, you know that question where you get to choose someone living or dead to have dinner with? Never choose Robert Cormier. That dude would turn any dish into funeral potatoes.
This one is no different, even though it's about a dude in his 70s trying to recapture something of his lost life. And the life he was forced to leave behind was so small, it is a matter of heartbreak that even that is too much to ask of the universe. I tell you what, you know that question where you get to choose someone living or dead to have dinner with? Never choose Robert Cormier. That dude would turn any dish into funeral potatoes.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews