The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
I don't usually read books with "book club" discussion questions in the back. It's not as ingrained a warning as the "O" stickers (damnit, I was going to read A Million Little Pieces, too), but it's up there. So imagine my surprise when I opened up The Time Traveler's Wife, read the first few sentences, and took it home from work. This book is engrossing. I'm not sure it's good, but I'm long past assuming the stuff that's good to read always is.
The plot, which is more or less explained in the first few pages so I'm not giving anything away, concerns the troubled romance between Clare and Henry. Troubled, I say, because Henry is given to inadvertent time travel, disappearing from the present and ending up all over the place. Naked. One of the places he ends up is a meadow near Clare's childhood home, and here begins the confusion: when Clare meets Henry, she is 6 and he in his 30's. When Henry meets Clare, he's 28 and she's 20. So by the time they meet, one of them knows they're married in the future. But can't really act on their impulses.
Although we know how things will go pretty early on, because of all the time travel and Henry meeting himself and various adventures undertaken but only one side reported, there is still considerable suspense. We don't know why things happen as they do. We don't know if Henry can change anything he's already seen (he can't). Even now, I'm not really sure why, but Niffenegger surely had to make some temporal decisions to make things work out.
As to that, the book is structured very nicely, with information revealed at just the right time to keep you reading and to avoid full disclosure too early on. However, though Clare and Henry are well-known to us due to first person narration, the other characters remain ciphers, basically there to be suspicious or get Henry out of jams. The book, over 500 pages, is already preoccupied with the time travel plot and doesn't have much to spare for supporting cast. One sign of Niffenegger's skill is that I hardly noticed the present-tense narration, which will usually keep me from reading any book. My interest waned in the last few chapters, but overall I enjoyed this book very much and recommend it to anyone who wants a romantic story that isn't a romance.
One caveat: I'm a little miffed still that stuff like this gets to be fiction (literary or otherwise) although it involves time travel. Isn't that science fiction? What's the difference? Is there something about this book which makes it "too good" to "ghettoize"?
The plot, which is more or less explained in the first few pages so I'm not giving anything away, concerns the troubled romance between Clare and Henry. Troubled, I say, because Henry is given to inadvertent time travel, disappearing from the present and ending up all over the place. Naked. One of the places he ends up is a meadow near Clare's childhood home, and here begins the confusion: when Clare meets Henry, she is 6 and he in his 30's. When Henry meets Clare, he's 28 and she's 20. So by the time they meet, one of them knows they're married in the future. But can't really act on their impulses.
Although we know how things will go pretty early on, because of all the time travel and Henry meeting himself and various adventures undertaken but only one side reported, there is still considerable suspense. We don't know why things happen as they do. We don't know if Henry can change anything he's already seen (he can't). Even now, I'm not really sure why, but Niffenegger surely had to make some temporal decisions to make things work out.
As to that, the book is structured very nicely, with information revealed at just the right time to keep you reading and to avoid full disclosure too early on. However, though Clare and Henry are well-known to us due to first person narration, the other characters remain ciphers, basically there to be suspicious or get Henry out of jams. The book, over 500 pages, is already preoccupied with the time travel plot and doesn't have much to spare for supporting cast. One sign of Niffenegger's skill is that I hardly noticed the present-tense narration, which will usually keep me from reading any book. My interest waned in the last few chapters, but overall I enjoyed this book very much and recommend it to anyone who wants a romantic story that isn't a romance.
One caveat: I'm a little miffed still that stuff like this gets to be fiction (literary or otherwise) although it involves time travel. Isn't that science fiction? What's the difference? Is there something about this book which makes it "too good" to "ghettoize"?