Review: THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE by Audrey Niffenegger

I "read" this book in the car during my frequent long commutes between students each day; actually, it was an unabridged audio book, and, like the last audio book, The Tender Bar, I loved it. It had two readers, one male and one female, for the time traveler Henry and his wife Claire, respectively. The basic story is that Henry has a genetic mutation that causes him to become dislocated in time; that is, his body from time to time leaves "his" time and travels backward or, occasionally, forward to a different time. Many times as an adult, he visits Claire as a child, so she then learns that later he will marry her; when they finally meet for the first time in his life, though, it is because she knows that he will marry her that she asks him on their "first" date, which is why he is later able to marry her at all. Thus cause and effect - and also free will - are deeply challenged in this book, leading to the inevitable ponderings about fate and God that must then follow. The book also explores all of the other questions that relate to this subject, though, such as using knowledge of the future for personal gain (i.e. the lottery, the stock market) and changing the future. In the latter, this book differs from another recent time-bending story, the movie The Lake House. I really liked The Lake House, but it was occasionally seemingly contradictory because the characters were able to change the past/future during the course of the movie, without the side effects that chaos theory suggests would follow. The Time Traveler's Wife, on the other hand, makes no such allowance for that change, which contributes to the above ponderings but also enables Niffenegger to craft a completely consistent story - a formidable task, in this case, and thus a very impressive one for its ultimate success. The book also seems chronological, albeit not chronological, because it at various times follows the "normal" chronology of Claire's life, the chronology of Henry's life (as he lives it, that is), and the chronology of their daughter Alma's life - the definition of postmodernism, perhaps. The end, of course, is foreshadowed from very close to the beginning, but the reader, like the characters, is not allowed to think about it too directly until she is deeply attached to them and involved in their lives; then, Niffenegger hits her with an incredibly powerful, heart-rending, but ultimately satisfying conclusion. Wow.

The book was also enjoyable for me because of its consistent manifestation of literary influences. Henry is a librarian and a philosopher, and he teaches Claire to enjoy poetry and to speak French and such when he visits her while she is a child. The book is permeated with quotes and references to countless great works that bear a surprising relevance to the story at hand; there is even a brief passage or two written in French. The readers are good Francophones, fortunately; there are occasional mispronunciations at other times, though. The ones that I remember are the male reader's initial use of "Vi-CO-din" (which he later read correctly as VI-co-din) and the female reader's pronunciation of Der-ri-DA, which she instead read in the popular but wrong way, "Der-RI-da."

The only major issue that bothered me was the book's celebration of another intelligent, talented, beautiful woman's life subsumed to that of a man. The book is really about Claire - the title, after all, refers only to her - but in so doing, it defines her solely by her relationship to Henry. Then, she spends her life waiting for him, only really living in relationship to him - just as most women have throughout the history of Western literature - which is arguably not the case for her husband as well. Her daughter may be the way out of that, but she's certainly not the focus of the book. It's a thought worth considering anyway.

At any rate, I highly recommend this book as well.