The Time Traveler’s Wife  by Audrey Niffenegger
MacAdam/Cage, 2003
Category:  Books people nag me about
Who nagged:  A whole bunch of women whose names I have forgotten, fortunately for them

This has to have been the most singularly unpleasant reading experience I have ever had.  Forget plot, character, theme, milieu; it exudes a low-grade psychic stench of depression from the beginning, as if Audrey Niffenegger wants her readers to be perfectly clear that this is a story without a happy ending, with every moment of objective happiness tainted by the knowledge that Life Sucks and the other shoe is not only going to drop, but grind you into the ground when it does.  I was miserable the entire time I was reading it, miserable enough to stop briefly after165 pages and ingest all of Equal Rites to remind myself that the world is still a wonderful place.  Normally I won’t continue reading anything I dislike that much, but in this case I had other motivations to finish (though I finally gave up and speed-read the last 60 pages) which I won’t go into.  No, it wasn’t for the sake of all those who now won’t have to read it.  I don’t love you people that much.

Here is why the book received so much critical and popular acclaim: it is a tragic love story read by people who have no experience of the vast canon of time-travel fiction.  It might as well be a story about a long-haul trucker whose schedule is irregular and whose marriage is a long series of meetings and departures, at the end of which he runs his rig into Hoover Dam and dies messily.  Without the cleverness of the time travel thing, this would be a tedious and all-too-common romance novel, or maybe a low-end lit-fic story.  Niffenegger seems to believe that exhaustive detail about her main characters’ surroundings and sex lives is enough to elicit empathy or identification in the reader, but she actually depends on the reader sympathizing with two people who are constantly losing each other–a genuine emotion that is tainted by a complete failure to follow through with the character development.  The major characters are empty; the minor characters are stereotypes (and therefore the only truly likeable people in the book).

But let’s talk about the time travel thing, shall we?  I’ve mentioned that one of the things I hate most in the reading world is the tendency of mainstream or literary writers to occasionally borrow an idea from speculative fiction and then sit around smugly believing they are so cool they could be used to freeze liquid nitrogen.  In reality, their efforts are usually about on a par with a kindergartener’s first smudgy drawings.  The rare exceptions (such as Children of Men or, arguably, The Sparrow) make these amateurish attempts even sadder.  I will give Niffenegger credit for mostly thinking through her time travel mechanics.  It *is* an interesting idea to write a relationship in which one person is unstuck in time; you’d have to keep track of what each of them knew, and when.  Niffenegger does this well, and I think it’s part of the appeal, because if she’d done it badly the book would have been incomprehensible.

On further examination, it starts to fall apart.  One key moment in the story is Henry and Clare’s (the protagonists) attempts to have a baby.  Clare has six miscarriages before finally carrying a child to term. The premise is that Henry’s time traveling is the result of a defective or aberrant gene, and the doctor studying him learns that embryos with the gene start time traveling in and out of the womb, where the mother’s body sees them as alien and either destroys them or dies from hemmorhage.  Clare’s successful pregnancy (because apparently Henry’s rare genetic condition BREEDS TRUE EVERY STINKING TIME) is the result of immunosuppressant therapy.  Sounds good, but it absolutely does not explain how Henry got born, without any such treatment, nor is it suggested that his mother went through the same cycle of miscarriages, even though it is quite clearly stated that this is the universal pattern with regard to time-traveling embryos.

The next problem is that Henry’s time-traveling adventures are clearly arranged by the author for the greatest possible impact.  Although Henry can travel beyond his own lifetime (he travels far enough to see his mother pregnant with himself, and beyond the year of his death) and his travels are apparently random, he conveniently doesn’t hop into the future and find out he dies at age 43 until he’s 41.  Since his death is also a conveniently manufactured event by the author, the whole thing smacks of ratcheting up the emotional tension.

Finally, there’s the ick factor of Henry at 32 dating and then at 41 making love to the teenage girl he’s not even married to yet.  Niffenegger tries to defuse this by having Clare wait for her18th birthday and then "seduce" Henry, knowing that she’ll marry him later, but there’s no getting around the Lolita vibe (and Henry being consciously aware of it enough to feel like Humbert Humbert doesn’t help either).  What really happens is that Clare, except for the brief scenes of her childhood, is always the Clare of the future.  The normal stages of a relationship are completely circumvented by Henry’s knowledge of her future self.  If she shapes him, he shapes her as well.  A story that focused more on the time travel and less on the romance might have been able to make something of it.  But no, ick.

You’re wondering how there could possibly be more at this point, right?  Is not a lack of character, a disregard for literary tradition, a circumvention of all the things that make a beautiful romance, enough that I should stop flagellating this poor first novel?  THERE’S MORE.  On top of all of this, Niffenegger tries to shoehorn in a philosophical discussion about determinism versus free will, and this is where I get seriously pissed off.  It’s a flaccid and poorly considered reiteration of the basic foundations of this very important argument–an argument that I am personally very interested in–and Niffenegger seems to think it’s enough to bring it up now and again without actually coming down on one side or another, despite the fact that her whole time travel argument depends on it.  If future-Henry literally can’t tell people in his time-traveling jaunts to the past things that will alter that behavior, why can he give them stocks to invest in, or tell them which numbers to choose in the lottery?  (Oh, yeah, he does that so he can buy his wife a big house with a real art studio.  Why they need eight million dollars for this, I don’t know.  Oh, right, because it would be too much like real life to give these people an ACTUAL, non-soap-operatic struggle like how to live on a hot time-traveling librarian’s salary.)  There’s no real consideration of indeterminacy as operant in either of the possibilities, and the issue of changing the "past" is either glossed over entirely or made to seem vitally important, depending on which is going to tug at the reader’s heartstrings more.

The reason it pisses me off is not the cavalier handling of a powerful philosophical concept.  It is that the readers of this story, who are almost certainly not well-read in either speculative fiction or Umberto Eco, may come away from this book believing they have just experienced something deep and profound, when in reality it’s no deeper than a puddle and no more profound than the late-night drunken mumblings of their college roommate.  It’s as if an entire generation of readers believed Twilight was the pinnacle of supernatural romance.  Oh, wait.  (True confession: I have serious moral and literary issues with the Twilight Saga, but at least it never made me feel like I needed to scrub my brain clean afterward.)

What a waste of time.  What a waste of talent; this is Niffenegger’s first novel, and for all its other flaws it has a brilliantly realized world, well-described and filled with the kind of detail that should have brought it to life.  If I were in a generous mood, I would say Niffenegger overreached herself.  Since I’m not, I’ll only say that if it wouldn’t leave a nasty mark on my driveway, I’d burn the book to dust.