Niffenegger, Audrey: The Time Traveler's Wife
The Time Traveler's Wife
Writer: Audrey Niffenegger
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 536
This was supposed to be my January reading, but school took priority and I had to wait to finish this book, which is a shame, as it was really, really beautiful.
The beautiful thing about this book is it picks you up and simply carries you. It’s about a time-traveling man whose wife has known him all her life, though he hasn’t known her. How does this happen? Finding out how, and seeing it happen, is the string that holds this book together. Hardly linear, or chronological, it’s easy to get a little lost in who’s narrating (it’s written in first person, present tense, from both Henry’s and Clare’s POV) and who is what age when something is happening, but Niffenegger is very good at doing everything to help readers sort out their confusion.
Each scene offers some spark of mystery, or a question, or an issue. You wonder about the future when a future version of Henry is speaking to a six-year-old Clare. You wonder how this man simply disappears from one time and appears in another. You wonder why this happens. You wonder if Henry and Clare would’ve ever gotten married had it not been for the various loops of time travel.
For a book whose primary current is time-travel, there is hardly any science. And what science is there is in the form of drugs and disappearing mice: nothing to scare away readers of a non-science background. The time travel serves as a function to reveal the lives of two people, to explore their relationship, and the consequences of it.
And what’s so appealing about the characters is how human they are. There’s nothing grand or exciting about them; they act as humans do, and at times, painfully so. But that, juxtaposed with the time traveling, is what makes this story work. Imagine being six years old, with someone who shows up as 41 one day, the 32 the next? That makes for a wild experience, and therefore, wild storytelling.
What’s interesting, though is this: Niffenegger’s style appeals to me. So much so I’m trying this whole alternating, first-person present tense style in my own work, just for giggles. But I notice that readers who aren’t character readers (and by character readers, I mean readers who just need a slight hint of mystery to keep reading about a character so they see what happens), have issues with the overall story. There isn’t enough action, or the plot is weak, etc. Those are valid points. Yet, different books have different strengths, and this is not an action-story. It’s not plot-driven. It’s character and idea-driven, and if those things don’t appeal to you enough to keep reading to get to the meat, you’ll have a hard time getting through this story. Some characters you like, others you don’t.
For my part, I loved it. It was well-written, the mood distinct, and the situation appealing. I liked the very, very end, but some of the sections between the climax and the end made me wish for something more. But this is definitely a book that I could read more than once, and that’s saying something, because I prefer to read new stuff, not re-read the old.
I know lots of people hate the term, “transcends the genre”, so I’ll call The Time Traveler’s Wife a bridge book. It takes a science fictional conceit and is written in the literary style. It’s a story about two people’s lives and how they're intertwined. It’s a love story, but it’s is far from a romance. In fact, I daresay that strict readers of SF and Romance would be displeased with this book, as it doesn’t follow either convention well enough to be classified as either SF or Romance. Which is why it’s fiction. Is it literary? It’s definitely mainstream…I view something as literary only if it stands some test of time to be determined as classic, and then it’s literature.
Whatever the classification, I loved it. It’s a good book for “literary” readers to read because it uses time travel in such an appealing and interesting and unobtrusive way. And it’s a good book for SF readers to read because it’s written in the literary style: with focus on language and characters: it departs from a lot of stylistic conventions SF readers are comfortable with, but it does it well.
But mostly, if you like reading about the human heart, the human relationship, you have to read this book. It’s simply beautiful, hands down.