The Time Traveler’s Wife

t turns out that I missed the boat the first time around on The Time Traveler’s Wife, so in light of the movie’s imminent release, I thought it might be a good idea to see what this novel is all about. As a Chicago resident and book lover, not to mention romantic, I found myself incredibly pleased with this book. At this point, almost everyone in the literary world has either read or heard about this book, and countless others are soon to see the movie (though I recently learned in a conversation with the author, Audrey Niffenegger, the movie might now be worth the ten bucks you’ll spend on it), and now I know why. This book is quite frankly one of the most fantastic love stories I have ever read, and it’s not just a love story.

I recently read an interview with Niffenegger in which she said that the book is mostly intended to be about waiting, rather than about love. An interesting idea, since waiting usually involves absence, so the only way to really get at it is to write around it, which is exactly what she does. The Time Traveler’s Wife is the story of a man named Henry who spontaneously travels through time. He almost always goes to places he’s been before or will be or to places where there are people that he knows. It is also the story of his wife, Clare, who he meets through time travel. Chicago residents will particularly like the book, as it takes place largely in the city of Chicago (with a few brief excursions to Michigan). Throughout his traveling Henry visits Clare as she grows up, and so the book becomes sort of a life-long love story. The title is a bit misleading–the book isn’t really about Clare, though it’s also not really about Henry. Instead, it’s about the relationship that they share.

I found the writing style to be quite comfortable. The dialogue is well paced, as was the novel as a whole. It’s suspenseful enough that you can’t put it down (even at 3 am, trust me) and the characters are so enigmatic and relate-able that the book seems to come to life as you read. It should also be noted that the sex scenes in the book, while not pornographic or over the top in any way (this is no Jean M. Auel novel), make the book seem more real to me, and I quite enjoyed them. Clare and Henry have a lot of sex, but somehow it seems just as normal as eating and breathing to them and to the reader. If you’ve never read this book, and you like romantic, quirky, interesting, suspenseful stories, you should read this book. And if you haven’t read this book already, you might want to stop reading my review, because I’m going to start giving away major plot points.

I have to admit that much as I liked the book, I found the ending a bit jarring. In the same aforementioned interview, Niffenegger also mentioned that she had written the end of the book before she wrote any other part of it, and then worked her way up to it. This doesn’t surprise me, as I started to feel, right around the time that Henry’s feet were amputated, that the book was taking a completely different turn. Of course Henry’s death was hinted at–we found out that he had died as soon as he saw Alba for the first time–yet there was always this sense that I had as a reader that something would be done about it, that his death wasn’t really death, that he had somehow been lost in time. Yet that’s not how the book worked. He knew when he would die, and he died. And that was it. Listening to Clare’s monologues in the end felt out of place, as the rest of the entire book had encompassed, in one way or another, their shared experiences. The end of the book was really the only place where the title of the book felt appropriate. I once had a professor tell me that a good novel will never surprise you. What she meant by this was that a good novel will never take a turn that you don’t believe or that doesn’t seem right. In a good novel, everything that happens should seem appropriate for the story. Much as I would call The Time Traveler’s Wife a good novel (and it is, mostly) I have to say that the ending surprised me in a way that I did not expect.

But maybe a part of that was my extreme sadness at the way Henry died. I mean, how heart-crushing. Who wouldn’t want it to have ended another way? Still, I would have liked to have known what happened with Alba, or Charisse and Gomez. It seemed like there was just enough information about them given to make the reader feel like there should have been more. The ending felt sadly incomplete. What did Clare say to Henry when he finally arrived during her 82nd year? After reading their conversations and how their lives fit together in such detail earlier in the book, I felt like I just wanted more.

Perhaps that was Niffenegger’s clever plan, however. After all, this is a highly romantic novel. Why not leave the reader pining?

Reading this novel also got me to thinking about issues of time travel. Niffenegger takes a different approach to time travel than many other stories on the subject, like, for example, Back to the Future. Instead of worrying about the way that altering the past can also alter the future, she simply creates a world in which, despite time travel, Henry is able to alter nothing that has already happened. Yet, in this world, everything seems to have already happened. He has, in effect, almost no agency in his life. Niffenegger has essentially created a world in which free will does not exist–everyone’s life already has a set program, and everyone is simply following their programed life to the letter. This is quite the interesting concept. Does this suggest the existence of God, or some other kind of omnipotent figure that is guiding these people’s lives? For what other reason could everything be fated? If Henry and Clare’s lives are fated to occur the way they do, what is the purpose? Perhaps they both needed to learn the lesson of waiting. I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed this fresh approach to time travel, though it left me with many questions.

Honestly, this book is a breath of fresh air in many ways. It’s not afraid to leave ends untied or break readers hearts (honestly, I cried). But at the same time, because of this we see life in a very realistic way (yes, realistic even with the time travel). This is what life is like. People die and it’s tragic and they leave others behind to wait and mourn. Relationships blossom like flowers and wilt when the time comes. This book uses time travel to cast a very realistic eye on what love is like, what growing up is like, and what dealing with problems is like. It’s a fantastic read. If you haven’t yet, crack it open. I promise, every one of it’s 540 pages is worth reading.