Culture Watch
The Time Traveler’s Wife
By Audrey Niffenegger
A Harvest Book paperback from Harcourt, Inc. , 536 pp
This wildly imaginative and intricately crafted novel was one of the Best Sellers of 2003, highly praised and listed in the top ten books of that year by an amazing number of reviewers and others who rank the publishing industry’s vast yearly output.
Touted as a love story, it manages to skirt soap opera and emerge as a heart-warming romance, but a romance without the usual rose-colored lenses.
The story is told alternately by Henry, the time traveler who involuntarily keeps yoyo-ing back and forth in his life (sometimes meeting himself in a younger or older version), and Clare, his beloved, who lives her life in a straight timeline. While the first couple of chapters may be a bit puzzling, is to the author’s credit that she quickly explains the process well enough so that the reader is no longer confused.
Headings are labeled with “Henry” or “Clare” to keep straight who is narrating which section, as well as with dates that make evident whether Henry is in the past, present or future. The story begins with their first meeting in what can be called concurrent time, when he is 28 and she 20, at the library where Henry works as librarian. For Clare, it is the moment for which she has been waiting, because Henry has been in and out of her life since she was six and he thirty-six. She has long known that one day they will meet and marry, because his back-traveling selves (of various ages) have told her so.
Henry, on the other hand, does not recognize her (after all, it’s his older selves who know her). One of the more delightful touches in this story is the change that their developing relationship works on Henry, and Clare’s recognition that Henry at 28 is not the same person she grew to love as she aged from six to twenty.
While the premise of this novel is ingenious and its construction intricate, the prose itself is lucid and sometimes luminous. Niffenegger keeps her complex tale moving in a straight line even as the story zigzags through the spiraling layers of time. Her ability to evoke time and place (Chicago between 1968 and 2053) is highly satisfying, and her characters are fully dimensional. Only a stone could fail to be moved by The Time Traveler’s Wife.
— JS
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