Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife

            This is the ultimate what we know and when we know it book. It’s essentially about dramatic irony, as played out in the lives of Henry, who jumps through time unpredictably, and Clare, who lives her life in normal chronology. Henry can’t take anything with him through time except knowledge. That very specific rule determines everything that happens throughout the novel.

            At first I thought Henry had a massive unfair advantage over Clare, who has to live everything in order, but then I realized that Clare grew up with knowledge of older Henry, but he isn’t privy to those earlier meetings until they happen in his timeline, meaning much later than Clare. Henry and Clare play out very different experiences of the same events because of their knowledge or lack of knowledge of what comes before or after in their lives.

            What effect does it have on our lives if we know what’s going to happen? This is a philosophical question, not a writing question, but it informs this story throughout. Would you want to know the date you’re going to die? Would you do anything differently if you knew what was coming up next for you? Would knowing the outcome make the outcome inevitable? Is the future going to unfold the way it’s going to unfold no matter what we do? Time travel stories always raise the question of determinism, since they presuppose a timeline that exists out there somewhere, moments along that timeline existing as places we can go.

            That fatalistic determinism drives this story, but luckily the characters are not in full possession of the facts. Henry knows he will live at least to 43, but does that mean he will only live to 43? Clare at 12 was present when 43 year old Henry was shot by a hunter, but doesn’t realize what that event actually was or meant until it happens in her real timeline, Henry vanishing from their home and reappearing with his guts shot out.

            I’m very glad that Henry (and later Alba) is the only time traveler. The complications that would accompany any story that tried to manage multiple time travelers just boggle the mind. But what strikes me most about Henry growing up a time traveler is that he sees himself as an adult when he’s still a child, and as a child when he’s an adult. He has incredible insight into other periods of his life, but can’t really make good use of that, can’t tell himself to do anything differently that will avoid his frozen feet or his final fatal time jump into that field with the hunters. Henry can and does teach his younger self how to pick locks and other useful survival skills, but there’s nothing he can do to change the circumstances that will come to pass.

            I love it that there are no external rules governing time travel, no agency or organization that tells people what they can and can’t do, no rules to break. Arbitrary rules are the weakest part of any speculative fiction, especially when there’s something supernatural going on. Rules that could easily go a different way can be infuriating because they reek of writerly convenience, or plot device. Okay, so vampires don’t breathe, we’re told…then how do they talk, or blow out candles, or smoke, for that matter? The rules for time travel in The Time Traveler’s Wife seem quite organic and put the crucial choices right back on the characters, not some external rule. This is a story about moral choices, doing the right thing, taking care of loved ones, trying to do right by them.

            Those moral choices inevitably take the routes of action/inaction and telling/not telling. It’s wonderful that Henry has no qualms about breaking into stores to steal clothes, or beating up someone who was harassing him, or finding out the winning lottery numbers when he’s in the future so that they can afford a house with a studio for Clare. His qualms, and Clare’s, all take the form of decisions over what to tell the other and when, what it’s right to do or not do. I’m so glad there’s no “breaking the rules of time travel” nonsense, no arbitrary lines that then must be crossed. That’s so tired, even though of course the deterministic or fated feeling of this novel must be the result of avoiding it.

            Fate! Inevitable events! This is high drama, tremendously moving and powerful. Of course we want Clare and Henry to live happily ever after, even with the terrible stress and pain of Henry’s time jumps, but we know it can’t happen. The author does this brilliantly, waiting to set up each new hurdle until we’ve wrapped our heads around the one before. We don’t start out worrying about how long Henry is going to live, or whether they can have children, or what their lives together will be like. The novel itself, while jumping all over the place in time and event, revisiting, changing perspective, adding things, traces the powerful story of Clare and Henry’s lives together. Their lives grow increasingly complex as they move toward the climax of Henry’s death.

            It’s interesting and problematic to me that Henry’s first jump saves him from certain death in a car accident. He even has a scar from where the sheet of steel that decapitated his mother touched his forehead, and would have sliced the top off his head, if he hadn’t made his first time jump out of the car. Time jumps are essentially corporeal events, treated as entirely physical, though they can be triggered by strong emotion or visual stimuli. They are compared to epilepsy. While Henry’s first jump saves his life, clearly his last jump costs him his life, even though he knows exactly what will happen. If it’s a physical reaction, it’s not purely for survival. The jumps leave him naked and vulnerable in dangerous situations all the time, so I might almost question the very first jump’s rescue, in a writing sense. That first jump sets up an understanding that turns out not to be true. Maybe it’s more like an animal’s instinct to fly or run, something that can save them but could also send them straight into the hunter’s gun. I really liked that the jumps are beneath the level of control.

            I cannot imagine the level of organization that this novel must have taken. Planning and thinking through all of the dozens of jumps, keeping track of who knows what when, figuring out who withholds information at what time and for what reason. This seems overwhelming to the point of impossibility. And I find it very interesting that Audrey Niffenegger’s next book left me completely cold. I did not buy the superficially similar supernatural basis for it one bit, and in fact found it brittle and fake. I will have to look up other readers’ reactions to see how common that was. This novel takes a couple of excellent, dependable literary tropes—fate, love, secrets—and combines them in a particularly brilliant way to turn a doomed love into something epic and tragic, something much bigger than the sum of its parts.