Thoughts: The Time Traveler’s Wife

The Time Traveler's Wife

This weekend, I read The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.

(Note that between the author’s surname and my compulsion to add an extra ‘L’ to “traveler,” this post is a typographical minefield.)

I rarely review books in part because I am not particularly good at it, and also because there are too many great books out there. If I started reviewing, I’d never have time to write anything else. (Indeed, I could devote this blog entirely to the bibliography of Roddy Doyle.) I am compelled to write about The Time Traveler’s Wife, however, because I adore it, and because its last few pages consist entirely of discussion questions for reading groups. This is a brilliant idea. I’d do the same for my novel, Red Planet Noir (coming soon!), but I’m not sure what questions I’d pose. (“When mobsters beat Lou to death in Chapter 8, they use a 7-iron. Is this a practical golf club for such purposes, or would a pitching wedge have made more sense? By choosing a 7-iron, what message was the author trying to convey to the reader?”)

If you’ve not read The Time Traveler’s Wife, leave now. Seriously. There be spoilers here. Read the book and come back.

If you hate good literature and don’t intend to read the book, go away because none of this will make any sense. Might I suggest this fine article on surviving the apocalypse?

If you’re still reading, here we go.

The Time Traveler’s Wife is science fiction. There, I said it.

Yes, it’s a romance. Yes, it’s extremely literary. Cross-genre? Sure. Nicholas Sparks as written by Margaret Atwood.  (Who herself refuses to categorize her masterwork Oryx and Crake as science fiction, choosing instead the mealymouthed “speculative fiction.”) But science fiction it is. I mention this only because every review I’ve run across wants to avoid the descriptor, and even the author is hesitant to embrace the genre.

Of all literature, it seems, science fiction is the most scorned. It is considered lowbrow. Inartistic. But crime fiction was considered lowbrow, too, until Raymond Chandler stepped to the plate and elevated it both as art and as an art form. Audrey, won’t you do the same for science fiction? I can think of five million reasons why you should.

But wherever you shelve it in the library, I loved this book. It’s almost impossible to believe that it’s a debut novel. That Audrey Niffenegger is a rookie. That she’s only going to get better from here.

The Time Traveler’s Wife is a beautiful, breathtaking book. Wondrous. Heartbreaking and glorious. I hate that its taken me so long to get to it, and hate that it’s over. Like the protagonist, I want to vanish in time, and somehow tell a younger me to find this book, and read it. I want to reread it for the first time again and again. And I want to travel to the future, and read Audrey Niffenegger’s next book, and the one after that. This book is proof that love exists, because only love could create this book.

I won’t bother with a plot summary, because you’ve already read the book (right?), so then, onto the discussion questions. I’ve answered just a few of my favorites, and drawn other questions from the web.

On the novel’s first page Clare declares, “I wait for Henry.” In what way does this define her character, and how is the theme of waiting developed throughout the book?

Clare’s entire life consists of waiting. As a young girl armed with a list of dates, she waits for Henry’s magical appearances. As an adolescent, she loves him and waits for his love in return. She waits to make love to him. After his final appearance, she waits to meet him in “real time.” She waits for the marriage she knows will happen. Then she waits for him to become the man she knows. She waits for him as he vanishes in time. She waits in the car when he visits the geneticist. She waits to conceive a child. She waits for childbirth. After the amputation, she waits for his death. She waits, at the end, for his return, for his final visit. This contrasts with Henry, who must always run, who is always a heartbeat away from blinking into time. Henry always moves. Clare always waits. Henry waits for but one thing: his death.

Just as Clare is defined by her waiting, so Henry is defined by his unpredictable comings and goings. That- along with his hard drinking and proclivities for stealing and beating people up- might be described as stereotypically masculine behavior, just as waiting might be called stereotypically feminine. What keeps these characters from being stereotypes? In what ways does the author, Audrey Niffenegger, give them depth and nuance? For example, at what points in the book do Henry and Clare reverse roles?

I don’t particularly like this question, though I’ll use it to give a different answer. Henry is exceptionally well-written as a character because he does, in fact, grow. Contrary to the question, in his forties Henry is not hard-drinking and starting bar fights. Quite the opposite. A larger theme of the novel is the moderating and maturing effect of marriage on man. Only after meeting Clare does Henry’s womanizing end. Only after marriage does he seek ways to stop time traveling. Only after marriage does he stop drinking. Only after Clare does he work on rebuilding his relationship with his father and face the demons of his mother’s death. As he and Clare suffer through the agony of miscarriage after miscarriage, Henry is back in time mentoring Clare as a child. And once Alba is born, he raises her in real time, and in the future, teaching her about life and survival.

While a young Henry might be described as “masculine,” only after meeting Clare can he really be described as a man.

Closely related to the theme of foreknowledge is the idea of free will. Does Henry’s chrono-instability give him a freedom that Clare lacks, or does it make him more powerless? Discuss Henry’s observation that “there is only free will when you are in time, in the present”

This question ties in with the last. There is an interesting role-reversal that takes place in the novel. Even though Henry is the time traveler, it is Clare who is more knowledgeable about Henry’s future and their future together. (Henry is essentially clueless for the first thirty years of his life.)  Only, I believe, when they start trying to have a baby does Henry become the more knowledgeable of the two, learning of Alba and then visiting her regularly throughout her life. And of course, learning of his own death.

Henry is blessed with the freedom to visit the people in time, but imprisoned by the events of time. He can watch his mother perform in an opera, but cannot stop her from dying in a car accident. In that way, his life is both a dream and a nightmare. It’s hard to describe his chrono-instability as “freedom” or “power,” because he arrives in time naked, lost and utterly vulnerable. I might argue that Clare is the more powerful of the two, because she is given glimpses of the future without the danger of what gaining that knowledge entails. The price she must pay is, as we discussed, waiting.

How has Henry’s personality been shaped by his bouts of chrono-displacement?

Certainly, Henry is coarsened by time travel. By necessity of survival, he becomes a skillful bare-handed brawler, a pickpocket and thief. But as he matures — after he has met Clare in real time — he becomes more tender, patient, understanding, almost philosophical about his existence. Pre-Clare, his chrono-displacement leaves him a feral animal in the wild. Post-Clare, he is a domesticated animal in the wild. He survives in either case, but with a different temperament and motivation.

What did you make of Niffenegger’s unusual narrative structure?

I thought at once that I would hate it. And in the hands of a lesser writer, it might have been a complete mess. But I was never lost, never confused, and by the final page, when each loose end was tied, it felt less like I had read a novel than watched a perfect game of chess.

What is the particular significance of Henry’s job as a librarian?

Libraries have a certain permanance and timelessness that would surely appeal to a time traveler. In a library, Dostoevsky stands next to Roddy Doyle. Douglas Adams is an arm’s reach from Jane Austen. The Harry Potter novel I read today is the very same novel that someone read a decade ago, and will read a century from now. Libraries are like spiderwebs of anachronisms.

An interview with Audrey Niffenegger

And for the dying writers out there, The Time Traveler’s Wife was rejected by twenty-five literary agents. It has sold 2.5 million copies.

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