It’s been a while since I picked up any of the books I picked for Emily’s Attacking the TBR Tome Challenge—I’ve only read three books from my list so far, and it’s already August! But after reading Fire and Hemlock I was in the mood for another novel, specifically another novel with a quirky romance aspect and The Time Traveler’s Wife seemed to fit the bill.
I feel like this is one of those books everyone but me read several years ago, and even if you haven’t read it, you probably know the basics of the plot: Henry travels through time; Clare doesn’t. Clare waits. This is both very unusual and not so unusual, as Clare notes in the prologue:
Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. (VII)
The narrative, like Henry, jumps back and forth in time, and the story is told sometimes by Henry and sometimes by Clare, which works nicely: you get the perspective of each, and you also get a sense of how odd their situation is: with Clare, as a child, you see Henry in his 30s; when Henry, at age 28, is talking to Clare, you know that she’s aware of a whole set of shared experiences that this Henry hasn’t had yet. The structure of the book (plus of course the plot!) makes you think about time itself, about the self moving through time, about your future self that doesn’t exist yet, or perhaps does. It makes you think about whether you can talk about a future self with any certainty, or whether you don’t, rather, have an array of possible future selves that might or might not end up ever existing. And it was interesting to compare Niffenegger’s rules-of-time-travel to, say, Connie Willis’s: in Niffenegger’s books, it’s not a problem for a time traveler to meet his earlier self, to be in the same place/time twice, and there isn’t too much worry about causing problems or paradoxes: things mostly just happen the way they will happen, and that is that. This is all interesting stuff, and once I got used to the dialogue (which at first seemed stilted, too disconnected from the more lyrical descriptive passages), the first half of the book was really compelling: delicious weekend reading that I seriously did not want to put down. (Though I suppose in part that’s a testament to how I feel about reading generally at the moment: it’s making me happy, it’s my quiet-time and my alone-time and my thing-that-I-write-about and it’s a hell of a lot more fun than cleaning out the fridge or putting away the clean laundry or cooking in 90-degree-heat. So, um, I am indulging myself, and reading a whole lot.)
Speaking of reading: I like how readerly this book is, how Henry is a librarian who counts “a mystery novel in bed” among his pleasures, how Claire, entering the Newberry Library for the first time, talks about her “Christmas-morning sense of the library as a big box full of beautiful books,” how Henry notes that his apartment “is basically a couch, an armchair, and about four thousand books,” how Clare, on the morning after their “first date,” looks at his bookshelves, lists out authors and titles (X, 3, 15).
But—and I guess, in part, this is the trouble of reading a book like this several years after everyone else has read it—all through that first half I kept feeling slightly squirmy, like: “this gets sad, right? when does it get sad? is it going to be OK when it gets sad or is it going to feel sappy and emotionally manipulative and annoying?” Which is a worry I would say I have moderately often when reading fiction, and am not sure how to articulate. What makes a sad ending moving in a way that feels “honest” or “true” (whatever those things mean; I’m not sure those are even the right terms), and what makes a sad ending feel like a manipulation or a betrayal? I don’t know, but I am pretty sure I have a strong preference for ambiguous or hopeful or happy endings, rather than sad ones.
So yes: this book had me worried, and the end did indeed feel unsatisfying, but even so, there were things in the second half of the book that I liked, things like this:
The compelling thing about making art—or making anything, I suppose—is the moment when the vaporous, insubstantial idea becomes a solid there, a thing, a substance in a world of substances. Circe, Nimbue, Artemis, Athena, all the old sorceresses: they must have known the feeling as they transformed mere men into fabulous creatures, stole the secrets of the magicians, disposed armies: ah, look, there it is, the new thing. Call it a swine, a war, a laurel tree. Call it art. The magic I can make is small magic now, deferred magic. Every day I work, but nothing ever materializes. I feel like Penelope, weaving and unweaving (284).
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