Book Review 7: The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife

Genres: Literary Fiction, Romance, Science Fiction, Time Travel, SciFi-Romance, Drama, Magical Realism, American Literature

Reading Level: Adult 

Setting: 1968-2008, Chicago, Illinois (USA) and South Haven, Michigan (USA) 

Published: 2003

Page Count: 536 (Paperback)

Content Warnings: Drug Use, Miscarriage, Infidelity, Suicide, Pedophilia

Rating: ★★★★⭑ (4.25 out of 5)

This is going to be a difficult novel to review, mainly because I don't support or condone a lot of what is happening in the plot (which comprises the majority of the story), but it is so well written. The problematic aspects of the story are ultimately the most interesting parts to analyze, to try and figure out exactly what Niffenegger is getting at.

The novel follows the love story, from beginning to bitter end, of Henry and Clare DeTamble. Their romance is no ordinary story, though. Henry is what the novel will come to know as a Chrono Displaced Person, or in layman's terms, he involuntarily travels through time. The result is that Clare met her future husband when she was just a little girl and he was well into his thirties, but Henry met Clare for the first time when they were both in their twenties, because for him, he hadn't lived the moment in his thirties when he first traveled back in time to Clare's parents backyard yet. However, in Clare's linear timeline, this happened when she was a girl, and she has been waiting her entire life to finally meet a man in her twenties that she has actually known for years, who she knows will later become her husband, but who will not know or recognize her the moment they first meet. As Clare is already privy to some of the most impactful and even intimate moments of the development of their relationship the day that Henry meets her for the first time, Henry must experience them for the first time as Clare is waiting for him to live the moments she has already lived.

Don't think too hard about it; just trust me, it works. In fact, one of my biggest compliments about this book is the way that Niffenegger does so well developing the way the time travel in her story works, and also keeping it in more of a "magical realism" atmosphere rather than a full-blown science fiction vibe. The way that the time travel wrinkles and blurs the lines between past, present, and future is perfectly plotted, expertly woven. Niffenegger keeps track of everything that she needs to, and no strange time travel-related event is left unaccounted for as we shift from Clare's childhood narrative to the present-day Henry and Clare narrative. She narrowly avoids plot holes or needless confusion with the science fiction aspect of the story; really, it serves as just the backdrop for a story that is, above all else, a romance. The way that Henry's eventual death is told through several twists of fate, induced by his time traveling, is revealed perfectly in line with the earlier foreshadowing. The only moment that feels like Niffenegger stumbles with where she chooses to reveal important time travel-related events is the moment in which Henry and Clare conceive their final (and only successful) pregnancy. We learn that it was a past version of Henry who ultimately impregnates Clare when he travels in time and present-Henry is asleep. This moment would have been much more effective had we seen it play out in real time for the past version Henry first (who didn't realize at the time that he would be getting future-Clare pregnant), and only revealing it resulted in a pregnancy in the later Henry's experiences. Instead, Niffenegger decides to shoehorn in the revelation that Henry once time traveled to the future and had sex with his wife-of-the-future right before the pregnancy reveal (shocking because the Henry of the future had already had a vasectomy). It just could have been interspersed into the plot better, more in keeping with the way the rest is handled.

The entire subplot of Clare and Henry's attempts to have a child is also interesting, as they play into the

magical realism aspect of the story. Henry's time-traveling is explained as a chronic condition that other people will eventually also suffer from, which doctors and scientists do not yet fully understand. Because of this, it is also hereditary. This means that any babies Clare and Henry conceive together could (and often do) have the condition. Clare's traumatic string of miscarriages are not typical miscarriages, but rather they are viable pregnancies in which the fetus is chrono-displaced like Henry, and they inadvertently travel through time just as Henry does. Each time this happens, the fetus is then miscarried becuase its time traveling causes it to leave Clare's uterus where it is still gestating, so it cannot survive.

I quite enjoy Niffengger's decision to explore miscarriage (and the traumatic impact it can have on a couple trying to conceive, and the unique trauma it causes on the mother's body) through this lens. It is a unique way of showing how the mother (in this instance, Clare) can do everything right to harvest a pregnancy, and she can still lose it. The physical toll and potential life-threatening complications that the miscarriages are having on Clare also show the way that the father can feel guilty for causing the situation through impregnating the mother in the first place. Henry feels that he is the source of Clare's suffering during her cycles of pregnancy and miscarriage and feels uncomfortable with the prospect of ever getting her pregnant again, because if the miscarriages ultimately kill her, he will blame himself, knowing that he is responsible for getting her pregnant. He feels that he is in control of the situation and can prevent any further damage by simply not getting Clare pregnant again, but this goes against Clare's wishes and desires to keep trying until she has a baby.

There is also a more interesting lens to explore this through. It is ultimately not the present-day Henry who impregnates Clare; it is a Henry from their happier past. It is also not present-day Henry on the day of his wedding to Clare who ultimately gets married, a different Henry comes back in time to complete the wedding ceremony when current-Henry gets displaced in time. The Henry that Clare falls in love with as a teen and eventually loses her virginity to is not the same Henry that she begins offically dating in her twenties; he is a future-Henry who knows, loves, and understands Clare through years of their marriage. All this to say, all of the huge milestones that Clare experiences in her relationship with Henry do not occur with the real, present-day, living Henry. They occur with past or future versions of him, versions that Clare seems to feel a stronger affinity towards in most cases than with the real, present-day Henry who exists in the same time as her. Obviously, all this is an exaggerated metaphor on Niffenegger's part, in which she explores idealization in romantic relationships. Clare's ideal Henry, the one she loves, is a future version of him who knows everything about her and understands her feelings, one who is happy, stable, and mature. The present-day Henry in his twenties who Clare begins dating is not yet that man, and she is constantly waiting for him to become the man that she had been waiting for since she was a girl. While Niffenegger chooses to use time travel as a way of presenting this as a literal reality in the story's plot, the idea here that she is getting at is that people have an idea of what their perfect partner, lover, spouse, etc. should and will be. When our partners don't live up to that ideal, we try to mould them into it. Clare is literally guiding Henry in his twenties to become the Henry in his thirties and forties that she waited for. She doesn't love Henry as he is, she loves the idea of him, the concept of a Henry he could be someday. The script later flips once they are older and the trauma of so many miscarriages (and Henry's decision to get a vasectomy without Clare's knowledge) comes into play. It is almost as if the shelf life of Clare and Henry's relationship has expired. They are not happy together anymore. They are miserable, so Clare gets impregnated by a younger Henry from a time when they were happy together. It is a metaphor for the yearning of a lost and happier time in a relationship, something that occurs to many couples when they realize their relationship or marriage is over; often they yearn to try and rekindle the love they felt in the past before letting go and moving on. One does not need their partner to be a time traveler to experience the same idealization that Clare does in her relationship with Henry.

It is also not just Clare who has this experience. While Clare seems to be constantly chasing after the idea of an older, more mature, stable Henry, Henry himself is the opposite. From his timeline, he fell in love with a twenty-year-old, younger Clare. Then, as his condition causes him to go back in time, he gets to know a child and teenage Clare. His understanding of his wife's emotions is often shaped by revelations and experiences with her in her teens, not with his present adult wife, who is much more mature than her past self. So while Clare is reveling in memories of the older, more mature Henry she craves, Henry is traveling back in time and seeking solace with a younger, wilder, and more carefree version of Clare that he seems to miss in his marriage to adult-Clare. The differences between the versions of themselves that Clare and Henry are ultimately yearning for highlight the fact that they are not really on the same page in their relationship, at least not as much as they seem to think they are. Henry wants youth, recklessness, a carefree Clare who is happy to have sex all the time and party. Clare wants maturity, stability, a family, and a Henry who she can rely on. They are never these versions of themselves at the same points in time, so they are constantly dancing around versions of each other, imitating at being in love whilst reveling in their dalliances with past and future versions of each other. They do love each other, but they don't love each other in their current states at the same time. There is love, and because of it, there is satisfaction, but can it be argued that they ever truly happy at any point in their lives? As previously stated, one does not need their partner to travel through time to experience these emotions.

This also segways directly into the uncomfortable part of the book: Clare was groomed. I'm not questioning it. I'm not saying, "was Clare groomed?" I am definitely stating that based on Clare's perspective, Henry groomed her. Sure, from Henry's perspective it may not come across that way--he was in his twenties, met a woman in her twenties, they dated then got married, and in his later life he learned about her childhood before he knew her (in the case of this book, literally, he went back in time). However, I'm not talking about how it comes across from Henry's perspective, I'm thinking of the way it reads from Clare's perspective. She was a little girl who befriended an adult man she didn't know. They met in secret in the woods, and she couldn't tell anyone. It continued until her teen years, where she crushed on him, waited for him, and then literally lost her virginity to him the day very day she turned eighteen. There is not a single aspect of that which isn't grooming. And it isn't as if Henry isn't aware of his own creepy thoughts; he thinks about being attracted to her when he travels back in time and meets her when she is twelve. He tries to explain it away by stating that he didn't view her as a child, he viewed her only as the woman he knows as his wife, but it is still disturbing. I also do not think this implication was lost on Niffenegger when she wrote the book, nor do I think it was simply the unintended consequence of the story's premise. She makes references in the book to Lolita. She knew exactly what she was doing.

I also am of the mindset that the disturbing reality that Clare was actually groomed (and the way that discomfort undercuts the romance aspect of the book the entire time you are reading) was the point. This whole novel feels like a metaphor for the way a relationship is not on equal footing when viewed through the eyes of either person in it. Henry's perspective on their relationship versus Clare's perspective changes things, and in a very distressing way. This is also highlighted in the fact that, outside Henry, Clare is never really able to form healthy romantic or sexual relationships with people (if you even want to classify her relationship with Henry as healthy, because I wouldn't). Her only other romantic experiences were once in college, when she slept with the guy dating her best friend, and once after Henry died, when she slept with the same guy, after he was married with kids, and she literally had to hide in the bathroom when his wife got home in the middle of them having sex. I puzzled for quite a while after finishing the novel what the point of Clare's dalliances into a man's infidelity were, and I have settled on it highlighting just how damaged Clare is when it comes to sex and romance. She can only be with men when it's forbidden, taboo, has to be a secret. It has to be wrong, and she gets that from the way Henry dominated her entire life even as a child. We even come to find out at the book's conclusion, in a scene that some readers may mistake for sweet if they don't think too hard about it, when we meet Clare as an old woman in her eighties who meets up with a past version of Henry (from before he died) who had traveled to her future and reunites with him once more before she dies. Once again, just like as a teen and young adult, she was just waiting around for Henry. She never moved on or fell in love again. It really isn't sweet or romantic at all given all the context.

The kicker of all this is that Henry doesn't view any aspect of his relationship with Clare as weird. His life experience of his time traveling has warped his reality so badly that he just cannot tell what is and isn't normal. It's actually a very timely metaphor. It's suprising that this book was published in 2003, because the themes explored above (if I'm analyzing them correctly) feel like they fit perfectly in a post Me Too world. If you have ever wondered how so many men and teenage boys can assault women and girls and yet somehow convince themselves that the encounters were consensual, Henry is a perfect case and point. The whole novel is. Because there are too competing narravtives beeing explored, one of a man who falls in love and gets married, and another of a girl who was groomed by an adult man until she was an adult and it ruined her entire life from then on out.

Niffenegger also does exceptionally well at writing the character of Henry from an authentic male point of view. If I hadn't known going in that a woman wrote this book, I would assume it had been written by a man, purely based on how realistically Henry's chapters feel that they are being written from a man's perspective. Niffenegger even goes so far as to let us know that as a teenager, before he lost his virgnity, Henry would travel back in time a month or two to his past self, and he would literally fuck himself. Do I think that this was a necessary component of the book? Absolutely not. Do I think it feels authentically male. Yes, absolutely. If you had presented that scenario to me before I read this book and asked what author I thought would write something like that, I would probably have said Stephen King. As superfluous as such an addition to the story may be, I absolutely believe that if a man really had time traveling abilities, this is what he would do.

Disturbing elements of the story that make it hard to read in places aside, if you read it as more of a metaphor and not a straight love story, it is mostly well written.

Book review 7 of 5,000 life time goal.