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Usage and spelling have regional variants, and Cory is (like myself) Canadian. We Canadians of a certain vintage (those educated before American spellings were given the nod in the Canadian Press Manual of Style) have tended to retain older spellings. "Pass-time" is among them, and it appears in Canadian writing (with or without the hyphen) far more often than the single-ess version.

He may be deliberately using a strange wording to point out that these activities "pass time" (and not much else). However, I agree that the wording is off. Especially considering that's what "pastime" means in the first place [1]. Paul Brians notes that "pastime" is correct, too [2].

[1]: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pastime [2]: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/pasttime.html

As a native speaker, I stumbled over it also. I've never seen it before. It may be idiosyncratic to Doctorow, but it's not in common usage.