The Time Traveler's Wife

"The Time Traveler's Wife" is one of the most interesting, powerful books I've read in a long time. Audrey Niffenegger did a beautiful job taking some of the most complex ideas - time travel, marriage, love, children, friends, literary and artistic allusions, religion, death, drugs, childhood, growing, loss, and what it means to be human - and weaving them together poetically and with amazing clarity. Her characters are wonderful, "real" people with strengths and flaws, and I really grew to adore them. Despite skipping around time at the same rate as Henry, the time traveler, the events are sequenced in such a way that you still witness each character's growth as a person, as well as discover many surprises along the way. Clare and Henry's story is one of the best love stories I've read in a very long time. This book also echoes important modern-day questions about the appropriateness of gene therapy, and what it means to be a human being. I highly and enthusiastically recommend this book.

I admit: I am an easy touch when it comes to time-travel books. I have loved such diverse books with this theme as "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", "A Wrinkle in Time," and "Time and Again."

I was not disappointed by "The Time Traveler's Wife." The book both moved me and challenged me to think about a number of deeper issues in life (most notably, the true meaning of love in a romantic relationship).

The underlying story concerns Henry, a librarian at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and Clare, his artist wife. Henry suffers from CDP (Chrono-Displacement Order) which whisks him from the present to another point of time (usually the past). One minute he may be in the stacks of the Newberry Library in 2003, the next minute he may find himself in a field (probably naked) in Michigan with his future wife as a child sometime in the early 1980's.

The author does an excellent job of sequencing the book. Even though Henry is shuttling back and forth in every chapter, she manages to move the plot forward. You do feel that you see Henry and Clare meeting, falling in love, starting a marriage and going through the stages of their lives. You do get to know their family and friends and see life happen to them.

However, I do feel that the author could have better developed all of her characters, particularly the supporting ones. I wanted to learn more about their close friends, Gomez and Charisse, and their troubled marriage. I felt that the landlady from Henry's child-whom he constantly visited in his time-traveling modes-was a sketch figure that could have been better developed. I wished that the author could have mined deeper into the inner feelings of Henry and Clare.

Still I would highly recommend this book to most readers. (If time-travel books bother you, this won't change your opinion.) It is a good, hard-to-put down read. And at the end, you're exhausted by all the travel!

I stumbled across this book by mistake and hesitated to read it simply because it was 518 pages. To my surprise, I devoured this book in a few days and felt a pang of sadness when it was finished. The author crafts a story of something that is quite unbelievable and yet deftly makes it so very believable. I was hooked after the first chapter. Niffenegger managed to suck me in to this story so that I felt emotionally bound to the characters and their plight. It's a tragic story that weaves so much love/pain/joy/disappointment that it fairly bursts with emotion. Read it!

Unlike a lot of the other critics of this book, I didn't have a problem with the idea that a six-year-old Clare could fall in love with a forty-year-old Henry. I didn't have a problem with Henry breaking into places or all that other stuff either. But I had MANY problems with this book.

One of the main problems I have with this book is brilliantly exemplified on page 392 -- the date, September 11th, 2001:

"Henry says, 'Wake up, Clare.' I open my eyes. The television picture swerves around. A city street. A sky. A white skyscraper on fire. An airplane, toylike, slowly flies into the second white tower. Silent flames shoot up. Henry turns up the volume. 'Oh my God,' says the voice of the television. 'Oh my God.'"

... And then this event is never referred to ever again. The story does not take place in New York, nor does 9/11 bear any kind of noticeable emotional impact upon any of the characters in any way. And yet this paragraph is in the book anyway. Why? Good question -- I'd like to know too. But this is only the most typified example of the author's compulsive habit of putting in useless subplots and shallow tangents into the book for no particular reason at all. Examples of this are littered throughout the book. Henry's mother died when he was only a young boy -- this apparently had such a traumatic effect upon him that he is constantly involuntarily sent back to the moment of her death to witness it again -- Henry even goes so far as to say that it's almost as if all his time traveling REVOLVES around this one event. Okay, fine. I can accept that -- there's a lot of potential in an idea like that. But where does the author take this? Nowhere. Absolutely nowhere. We are left with the knowledge that Harry sometimes relives his mother's death, that it bothers him especially on Christmas Eve, but otherwise it has no bearing upon the plot, and even more frighteningly, upon Henry himself. The fact of his mother's death is treated like trivia knowledge rather than emotional trauma. Another example is Gomez's apparent harbored affections for Clare. Not only does this information come ridiculously out of left field, but it is never developed. It's alluded to perhaps twice, and then Gomez comes on to Clare ONCE and then that's it, the story moves along as if it never happened, and it has no bearing upon anything.

This shallowness unfortunately mars the entire story, because it does not stop at the inclusion of shallowly developed subplots, but it goes into and ruins nearly every sphere of the book. Shallowly developed subplots is a problem, but shallowly developed characters is a much bigger one. The only characters who have any development at all are Henry and Clare, and neither of them have very much depth either. Clare is patient, kind, sexy, beautiful, loyal, artistic, rich, good in bed, etc. etc. As for the secondary characters, they were so flagrantly underdeveloped that I found myself mixing up names quite frequently, because there was nothing in the characters to make me care, nor to help me differentiate. Gomez was known to me as "that guy who smokes cigarettes." Ingrid was known as "the suicidal." Charisse was "the girl who dates the guy who smokes cigarettes." It's not that I'm a lazy reader -- it's that Audrey Niffenegger is a lazy writer -- she uses things like cigarette smoking to define a character, but then that's it, that's as far as the depth goes. Every character has the exact same vocabulary, the exact same voice -- I often felt the dialogues were the author writing out conversations with herself as she tried to sound witty. "Tell me Clare, why on earth would a lovely girl like you want to marry Henry?" "Because he's really, really good in bed." That's supposed to be a joke, and that's fine, but so much of the dialogue is written this way: trite, witty, one-liners, and they never say anything about the character involved, because every character speaks in the exact same way (unless you count Nell and Kimy, both of whom I considered to be just racial stereotypes).

I hate to take this further but then even the romance itself, the most important thing in the whole book, was yes, shallow. The quote mentioned above was supposed to be a joke, but the more the book went along, the more I began to suspect that the line was meant to be taken seriously. Clare first meets Henry when she is but a little girl, and throughout the course of her childhood and adolesence she sporadically meets this older Henry and falls in love with him. By the time they are married, it is surely meant to be. Now, I did not find this idea to be creepy as some did, I thought it had a lot of potential, but the writer never shows us WHY she would fall in love with a naked forty-year-old man -- it's almost as if Clare simply falls in love with Henry because he happens to show up every now and again, and it doesn't make any sense. Henry, before he meets Clare is a hard-edged, drug-using, womanizing punk, but then the moment he meets Clare in Chicago and she basically tells him "we're meant to be," he magically reforms himself, throws away his old life and habits, accepts what she tells him, falls in love overnight, but the reader is effectively shortchanged, almost as if the reader's meant to accept the romance on the grounds that it was meant to be, and that's that. Had the writer made the same effort to develop the romance as she did to put in countless unnecessarily graphic (and poorly written) sex scenes, then perhaps I'd feel differently.

Because of this shallowness, not only are the characters bland, not only is the romance unconvincing, but even the story itself runs itself around in circles over and over and over and over again. By the time the reader learns about the eventual fate of the characters, there is nothing left to do except wait for the author to get there already, and let me tell you, she takes her time.

I have nothing against long books, romance books, or time traveling sci-fi books. But I do have something against books that are sloppy, poorly edited, contrived, and worst of all, shallow. I wanted to like this book, and I had high hopes. To my disappointment, I left this book utterly unfulfilled.

I'm quite obviously in the minority here, particularly among non-fans: I found the narrative jumping around in time to be quite effective - the characters are often confused and surprised by non-linear time; this device gives us a taste of that. Nor was I bothered by the use of profanity, descriptions of sexuality, or the idea that an adult Henry maintains contact with Claire as a child.

It's what happens (or doesn't happen) in the space between that sets my teeth on edge. For example: we are forced to endure paragraph (after paragraph after paragraph) describing a game of pool. Not the interactions between characters during said pool game, no no. If you like to listen to golf on the radio, then you might find who-made-what-shot-in-which-pocket to be entertaining. I started to rage because I was wasting so much time reading this nonsense.

I was also thoroughly annoyed at the 'name dropping' style of writing that was sometimes rewarded with an explanation, but most often not. I can't remember all of the characters names offhand, but they'll enter the story with something like, 'Fred walked in and startled me.' Yeah, he startled me too. Who the hell is Fred? We find out several pages later, 'Fred Flintstone was a childhood friend'. Thanks, coulda used that information ten minutes ago.

But this isn't limited to people. The characters ponder going to Ann Sather's for something to eat. Neighbor? Relative? Last night's one-night-stand who happens to make great waffles? Two pages later it's revealed that it's a Swedish restaurant. They talk of the CSO - only later can the acronym be explained as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. As a Chicago native I recognized these references, but they grated on me nonetheless.

Same with descriptions. 'He looked like Joe Schmoe.' Great. That helps. Not 'his hair was slicked back in that Joe Schmoe style' or something like that - at least then I would start to form a mental picture. To use a similie with a subculture or hipster reference and no context is pretentious and condescending. 'He answered the phone while standing in front of a Maholy-Nagy poster'. How many people are familiar with the Chicago Bauhaus movement and would get this reference? What does it add to the story?

I've gone on too long already with my rant and haven't even mentioned the street directions - complete with street names. I don't care which streets you take to get to the library, either tell me what happens along the way or just get there already.

The one highlight of the book (and yes, there is one), is the climactic scene we all know is coming. It was handled in a very touching and sensitive way that nearly brought me to tears. If only the rest of the book could be like these three pages, I wouldn't have to count it among the absolute worst books I've ever read.