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May 01, 2005

The Time Traveler's Wife -- Audrey Niffenegger *****

It's Sunday evening and I'm taking a Deadwood break. I watch it both times it comes on. Right now I'm between showings so I thought I'd catch up here. Tomorrow I go back into my three-day writing push. On to the review.

So I'm an obsessive personality; this must come as no surprise to people who read this weblog on a regular basis. Things get stuck in my head and bounce around for long periods of time, and I talk about them. I am cyclic obsessive, when it comes to books. There are maybe thirty books total in my lifetime of reading that have a permanent spot in the ferris wheel that is my reading mind. These are the books I come back to again and again, because they struck some chord.

When I find a new book that requires a permanent spot on that ferris wheel, I am overjoyed and awed and sad, because when I'm done, that first thrilling ride is over and can't be recaptured. Of course subsequent rides will be satisfying in other ways.

In the past few weeks I've listened to the unabridged audio of The Time Traveler's Wife and I've read it through from cover to cover, twice. It's here in my mind, to stay. The thing is, to tell you why. If I can.

Authors who risk a lot always get my attention. Maybe because I am not so adventurous as a writer -- and here I'm not talking about plot, but about style and theme. Niffenegger's imagination, the mind that put together Henry and his world, have my complete respect. The same kind of respect I feel for people like Karl Orff, who took a lot of musical ideas and historical bits and pieces and wove them into something as odd and powerful as the Carmina Burana. Or Danny Rubin, who conceived and wrote the screenplay for Groundhog Day.

The Time Traveler's Wife is an unusual novel, with an unusual premise. Time travel itself has been done, sure. From many angles. But not like this because for Henry, time travel is a result of a genetic flaw having to do with specific genes that govern sight and circadian rhythms. It is as disruptive to his life as grand mal epilepsy would be. He does not know when he will go, where or when he will end up, how long he will be gone. He does know that he will arrive naked, stripped off everything including the filling in a tooth. He comes back the same way, sometimes bloody, or half frozen. He depends on his wits and his speed to save him when he finds himself in unfamiliar and hostile times and places. He first meets the woman he will marry when he is more than thirty, and time traveling. She is six at that first meeting. They don't meet in the now until she is twenty and he is twenty-eight, and he has no idea who she is -- because he has not yet reached the age when he travels back to meet her.

But Henry and Clare's story is far richer and complex than one that deals exclusively with the inconveniences of chrono-displacement (as the impairment will come to be called in the future, where Henry finds himself on occasion). If this novel were nothing more than one awkward situation after another that the characters had to meet with humor or wit or melodrama, The Time Traveler's Wife would be a poor imitation and rehashing of Bewitched. But the strength of this story is the way the characters evolve and change in response to the unpredictability of their world and daily lives. It's a love story of the most gratifying and unusual type, with multiple turns and endings. Some are touching and happy and funny and others are sad. Listening to the book, I found myself sitting at lights that had turned to green with tears streaming down my face. Because even when things go terribly wrong, they were as they had to be, and it felt right.

I will have to read this book a couple more times before I can address, in a more factual and objective way, how it was put together. For the moment let me say that Niffenegger is a wonderful storyteller but also a great prose stylist. Sometime soon I'll come back to this subject and address some of the choices she made in terms of narrative voice and structure. Oh and, this novel is set -- about ninety percent of it is set -- in Chicago, in the neighborhoods were I grew up and later lived, and I was overcome by homesickness with every page.

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