"The Time Traveler's Wife"
Audrey Niffenegger
Harcourt, Inc., $14
According to the book's jacket, "The Time Traveler's Wife" is "A most untraditional love story ..." and that might be the best way to explain it.
Audrey Niffenegger's novel tells the untraditional love story of Clare Abshire and Henry DeTamble. The pair are eight years apart. But because Henry is a time traveler, Clare meets Henry when she is 6, and Henry meets Clare when he is 28. So Clare grows up knowing who she will marry, and Henry has no clue of Clare's existence until he is 28.
They meet in real time and fall in love, and they go through the same troubles that all couples face. But their troubles are complicated, due to the fact that Henry disappears randomly to unknown places and times for varied periods of time. He travels most often when he's nervous, and finds himself naked, hungry and nauseated during his trips, not to mention lost and confused. And after he meets Clare in present time, he leaves her alone, confused and wondering when he will return:
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, waitin. Why had he gone where I cannot follow? (vii)
Niffenegger doesn't follow traditional rules of writing. The book is filled with run-on sentences, so you feel as though you are having conversations with Henry and Clare rather than reading a book, and somehow the blending of thoughts into lengthy breaths makes them easier to read. She also doesn't tell the story chronologically, for obvious reasons, but rather in a way that seems to make sense — telling the different vignettes of Henry's and Clare's lives in the order in which the reader would learn about them as though they were an aside, a flashback, but most of the time, they are told in the present while Henry is time traveling.
She takes real events and real places and gives her characters real problems to deal with — school, money, jobs, life, death, sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, alcohol, cancer, AIDS — and the not so real problem of time travel, which is made real by the details with which she explains the incidents during Henry's travels.
Niffenegger's story is somehow believable, her characters lovable. Readers will find themselves attached to the couple they want to see succeed though they are dealing with the most difficult obstacle to overcome.
"The Time Traveler's Wife" is proof that the magic of love can triumph over hardships and time. It's nice to see a story of love having the ability to conquer all in a world with just too little of it.
