Grimwood, Ken: Replay
Replay (1987)
Written by: Ken Grimwood
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 311 (Trade Paperback)
There are two people you need to blame for me reading this book. The first, and most important, is Jo Walton, whose Tor.com review had me searching my local store inventory so I could pick it up the next time I was there. But also Doc Jensen, Entertainment Weekly columnist and Lost theorist extraordinaire, for planting the seed by referring to this book in his analysis of the season five finale. So this book has been nibbling away at my brain for little less than a year, and thanks to the sixth season of Lost (Walton's review of the book just tipped the scales), now was the perfect time to read it.
The premise: ganked from BN.com: Jeff Winston, forty-three, didn't know he was a replayer until he died and woke up twenty-five years younger in his college dorm room; he lived another life. And died again. And lived again and died again--in a continuous twenty-five-year cycle--each time starting from scratch at the age of eighteen to reclaim lost loves, remedy past mistakes, or make a fortune in the stock market. A novel of gripping adventure, romance, and fascinating speculation on the nature of time, Replay asks the question: "What if you could live your life over again?"
Review style: More than anything, I want to talk about the concept and what that means for a novel: you'd think the whole thing would get repetitive and boring, but not so, and I want to talk about why. I also want to touch on my theories of how the ending would play out and compare that to what actually happens, so SPOILERS. Seriously, don't read this review if you don't want to be spoiled, and can I just say that you DON'T want to spoil yourself for this one? Why yes, I do. So jump to "My Rating" and avoid the spoilers, unless you've already read it, of course. :)
What a compelling novel. If you told me to describe this book with one word, it would be that: compelling. Because the moment the plot is set in motion and you understand that Jeff is destined to keep reliving the same period of his life over and over and over, two things happen.
1) You start wondering what YOU would do if you were in his shoes, and let me tell you: it's FASCINATING to really think about what you could change if you were sent back twenty-five years into your past (and if you're not OLD enough for that yet, well, this book may have less appeal), and if you'd kept your memories of your previous life. However, that leads to the second:
2) You're HORRIFIED. Because let's face it: if you were sent back to a time where you're forced to go through the motions of high school all over again, how painful would that be? Sure, you'd be smarter (you hope), but emotionally and mentally, you're above all that, and frankly, I think it'd be hell to go through over and over and over again.
That said, there's a catch to the plot: each time you replay, you loose a little bit of time. At first, it's not noticeable, but what starts as minutes off becomes hours, then days, then months, then years, so the more replays you have, the less opportunity you have to change that first life. That, too, is horrifying, especially if you're in a place where starting over YOUNGER would benefit you more.
And that's the trick: you'd think that Jeff would make the same decisions over and over again, but each life teaches him something new. With his first replay, he's using his knowledge of the future to get rich, but that changes him in such a profound way that the woman he took as his wife from his original timeline wants nothing to do with him. So he lives the life of a rich man and marries appropriately. THAT experience teaches him of a life he doesn't want at all (both the good and the bad), so when he comes back, he's smarter with his investments and woos his college sweetheart and builds what appears to be the perfect life. And then he comes back again, bitter and angry because he can't recreate the SAME EXACT LIFE with Judy, it's been done, and he spirals downward until he recluses out and learns that he's not the only replayer in the world.
I'll get back to that, but there's a lot of things I want to touch on. This concept doesn't really care about minor changes to the world-at-large, but yet major ones are important : when Jeff tries to prevent the Kennedy assassination, he gets Lee Harvey Oswald arrested only to have the assassination still happen, only this time by someone new. But an extreme opposite happens too: in one replay, Jeff wants answers to what's happening to him and why, so he goes public, which leads into a MAJOR world-change and events start happening to the point where he can't predict anything anymore.
And all of these replays, all of these lives, raise a question: are Jeff's replays a single timeline that starts and stops and keeps looping around with different results, or are they parallel worlds where whatever Jeff's impact had created, that world keeps going long after he's gone from it? We never get any answers, though I think we get a hint at the end, but I think the speculation is more compelling than cold, hard facts would be.
No, there's never an explanation for what's happening to Jeff, even though he tries to find one. It's a lot like Octavia E. Butler's Kindred: you never learn the science behind the time travel, only that it has VERY specific rules that it follows, and it's the one thing you can count on. In Kindred, Dana was yanked back whenever her ancestor was in mortal danger. In Replay, Jeff has a specific time and date where his heart just fails, and he's sent back to a younger version of himself (and the slippage is never explained either).
It is fascinating. I loved seeing the various choices he made each time based on all the lives that had gone on before. And what really kicked the story up a notch was the introduction of Pamela, another replayer.
Pamela makes her own mark on the world in her third replay: she makes a movie that becomes a world-wide phenomenon, and Jeff knows instantly that she's a replayer, because a movie this big would've never been ignored by him in any of his previous incarnations. And once they get over their differences, and trust me, they have some, they fall in love, so that in each consecutive replay afterwards, they keep trying to find each other.
This is where the emotional heartstrings get pulled, and there's also moments of humor. In truth, I think their best replay together is when they first meet, because the next time they're obsessed with finding other replayers, which doesn't go as well as expected, and then the next time they go public for answers, which ends in disaster, and then the next time they're already into their adult lives and living with adult decisions that they can't really walk away from. And so on and so forth.
Their relationship is fascinating, and Jeff's search for her reminds me in some ways of The Time Traveler's Wife, though the concepts are so very completely different. And the relationship also begs the question: is there such a thing as knowing someone too well? Of spending TOO much time together? If any of us were given us an opportunity to replay our lives over and over and over, if we knew we were guaranteed to get another second chance, why not make different romantic decisions, just to see where they lead? Jeff and Pamela work because they remember each other from each life, so their love and knowledge of each other grows. But in contrast, they come to love each other TOO much. Know each other TOO well. So that when the end happens, their decision makes quite a bit of bittersweet sense.
I've already mentioned the slippage. Reading, I kept wondering what would happen as the replays kept getting shorter and they approached their death all over again. Would they die for real? Or would it start all over again from the twenty-five years ago mark? The latter was my bet, only to learn, in a perplexing manner, I was completely wrong.
BEWARE. I AM ABOUT TO SPOIL YOU.
At the end, Jeff keeps reliving that heart-attack over and over and over in ridiculously fast succession. And then a strange thing happens. In the beginning, we learn Jeff dies while on the phone with his wife Linda, and she's in the middle of a question.
What happens? We hear the rest of that question. All of a sudden, this original life continues as if he'd never had a heart attack at all. As if he'd never died. And he's shaken and shattered and wondering if he'd just had the hallucination to end all hallucinations. What does he do? He calls Pamela, learns she just experienced the same sensations, and they realize they now have the rest of their lives--original lives--ahead of them. Lives that won't be lived with the knowledge of the future, but rather the collected knowledge of the past. The future is now a mystery, and Jeff's able to approach it with a kind of confidence that whatever happens, he's going to live it his way and do what makes him happy: to not let work or women or money define what he does. He and Pamela decide to stay where they're at (she wants to enjoy her children), and so the book ends with the future clear in the way that the future is for all of us: unknown, but full of possibility.
What a perplexing ending. It raises a whole new question. Instead of, "What would you do if YOU replayed?" the question becomes, "How would all of those replays affect you once you landed back in your original life?" Would it be a relief? A heartbreak? What?
Jo Walton brings up some interesting questions: why didn't Jeff ever try to learn anything new while he still could? Such knowledge would've benefited him greatly when he returned to his original life (granted, he had no idea that he WOULD be returning to his original life). Instead, he relies on betting and investments to coast by, and it becomes the ultimate in wish fulfillment: he has the money to do whatever he wants, and so he does. And sure, why not? Not everyone's meant to be a lifelong learner, and I can't help but wonder if--even for lifelong learners--multiple replays might not make learning something new rather tedious. I guess it depends on the person.
As an artist, which is what Pamela was, it's fascinating. Her painting skills get better with each replay, so when she returns to her original life, she'll be a major step ahead of where she used to be, if she still has the inspiration to paint. She also now has the skills of a doctor, which could come in handy, and she did write that movie that changed the world. Jeff isn't coming back with such enhanced knowledge, so in hindsight, even though he did write Pulitzer Prize-winning novels (or was it just one?), he's no longer in the place he used to be in order to create. So what will he do?
The book ends with optimism, but ultimately, it makes you question every choice and every decision made.
And there's also a twist: an epilogue introducing us to someone new, who's landed back in the year 1988, where Pamela and Jeff kept dying at, so HIS twenty-five year replay will take him to 2017. And that just made me laugh a bit in wonder: was there someone truly controlling these replays? Can only certain people replay certain periods at a time? Were there replayers from 1938-1963, where Jeff started over? Fascinating, and again, I think it's the possibilities and questions that are more satisfying than the hard answers. I think these are the very things, aside from the emotional core, that will make this book worth coming back to.
For the record, I think my favorite replays were Jeff's life with Judy, the first time he spent with Pamela (though not what led up to it), and then his first replay with Linda.
My Rating
Must Have: it's one of the most compelling novels I've read in a while, and it makes you wonder, it makes you imagine, and it makes you ask questions. The ending still has me, not perplexed so much as contemplative, and it's the kind of book where not having hard answers will make it worth coming back to. Though, it's not just the questions that drive the book, it's the fact that we get to watch so many different versions of Jeff's life unfold before our eyes, how his knowledge from previous lives directly effect the way he lives the next one. It's fascinating, and while in some way, a bit on the wish-fulfillment side, it works because while Jeff gets to start over, over and over again, we get to ask ourselves the same question: what would WE do? How would WE change, if we had the very same opportunity? It's a fascinating book, and one I'd thoroughly recommend to any fan of time travel. It, like Octavia E. Butler's Kindred, doesn't give you the reasons WHY it's happening, but follows strict rules in terms of how it works, and like Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, there becomes a strong emotional, romantic core to the book that could not exist without the time travel. It's a great read, and also (randomly), if you're a fan of the television show Lost? You'll totally want to read this. :)
Cover Commentary: My copy has a big red triangle in the upper-left hand corner with a quote blurbing the book, but beyond that little eyesore, I rather like the simplicity of showing the same picture over and over and over. It's a nicely designed cover that's guaranteed to grab your attention, provided it's facing out on the shelves.
Next up: Seeing by José Saramago