Pawanraj Sadhwani

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger is a love story of Henry and Clare.

Henry suffers from a genetic disorder that causes him to time-travel unpredictably, and his artist wife Clare suffers... well she suffers most of the consequences of this unpredictability.

The plot is extremely simple per se. Boy meets girl, boy gets to know girl, they become boyfriend girlfriend, do boyfriend-girlfriend stuff, boy marries girl, they do husband-wife stuff, boy dies. Except this sequence is complicated by a singular plot device: temporal disarticulation of the boy.

And the disarticulation is used to articulate many themes: chief among them being a depiction of enduring love. Niffenegger's portrayal of enduring love is Clare - an anchor, a safe harbor that you can return to no matter how fucked everything gets. Her love waits patiently, and accepts unconditionally. In the Henry and Clare world love overcomes all obstacles, even death. Apparently, a driving force while Niffenegger was writing the book was her need to create her ideal love (after a string of failed relationships). And she certainly goes a fair ways in indulging herself.

Other than that, I was compelled to reflect on how time affects and constrains us. On the one hand, there are indications of just how much reliance we place on temporal context and how unmoored we are without it. On the other, it also occurred to me, how living chronologically could be... well... boring.

Henry's time-travels, his reaction to it, and the difficulties it puts him and others in his life also raise questions of the need to feel in control, and have an illusion of choice even if everything is deterministic - just to avoid falling into depression. Henry's thought about running, his insistence on not revealing the future, and Clare's frustrations during the house-hunt are just some examples of events that force you to think.

In raising these ideas, Niffenegger's writing shows a lot of promise. The story is fairly tightly woven, considering time travel is the central device for breaking the linearity. Foreshadowing future events leads, for the most part, to satisfying payoffs. And the author's descriptive writing style serves to ground the reader in the here and now when they are unceremoniously dumped into a different temporal location.

That being said, descriptions ARE excessive. Even accounting for the need for grounding, it feels unnecessary to tell me for the nth time that Henry is naked and needs to find clothes. Or the contents of Henry and Clare's grocery shopping. Or the minutiae of paper-making. These descriptions slow everything down, and take the space that could've been better utilized to explore, for instance Henry's feelings about time-travel, his growth due to it, reactions of his "friends and family" to it, or in general defining character arcs and character growth.

Instead, we get a lot of ... acceptance. Henry rapidly adjusts to "his problem", and proceeds to use time traveling as an excuse to drink, get high and get into trouble - when, ironically, stress is what makes him time travel in the first place. He is mostly self-centered and only towards the later part of the book comes to appreciate Clare as his anchor while he is unmoored in time. Clare at age six and age 85 is pretty much the same. Her outlook is accepting of Henry and her, and very fatalistic with only the occasional hints at her frustration, that goes unaddressed (for e.g. the househunt that she tries to go at alone, or when she sleeps with Gomez). Henry's friends and colleagues (Gomez, Ben, his library colleagues) just accept that he is weird / a time-traveler.

Other characters are mostly cardboard cutouts and stereotypical - an Asian who can't speak good English, a posh Downton Abbey family, complete with a crazy mom, men fond of hunting, and servants. They are just there.

What would've been nice is probing into their reactions to Henry's condition, their own adjustments and growth to it, and a story to fill in the gaps instead of using time travel to conveniently move the story forward, and using words to describe "skits". Time travel is fascinating and raises a ton of questions. In this book, time travel is just a crutch to prop up a love story.

Which is fine, if you like the idea of forever-after love and love stories. If you find joy in descriptive writing in general, you'll get your fix. But if you, like me, go into it intrigued by a possible exploration of the themes of time travel, you might be left a little wanting. You might even find the book 100 pages too long.

To be clear, it isn't a terrible book. But it is one I'd put firmly in the category of "just alright". 3/5 stars.