The Time Traveler's Wife

I was not disappointed by "The Time Traveler's Wife." The book both moved me and challenged me to think about a number of deeper issues in life (most notably, the true meaning of love in a romantic relationship).

The underlying story concerns Henry, a librarian at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and Clare, his artist wife. Henry suffers from CDP (Chrono-Displacement Order) which whisks him from the present to another point of time (usually the past). One minute he may be in the stacks of the Newberry Library in 2003, the next minute he may find himself in a field (probably naked) in Michigan with his future wife as a child sometime in the early 1980's.

The author does an excellent job of sequencing the book. Even though Henry is shuttling back and forth in every chapter, she manages to move the plot forward. You do feel that you see Henry and Clare meeting, falling in love, starting a marriage and going through the stages of their lives. You do get to know their family and friends and see life happen to them.

However, I do feel that the author could have better developed all of her characters, particularly the supporting ones. I wanted to learn more about their close friends, Gomez and Charisse, and their troubled marriage. I felt that the landlady from Henry's child-whom he constantly visited in his time-traveling modes-was a sketch figure that could have been better developed. I wished that the author could have mined deeper into the inner feelings of Henry and Clare.

Still I would highly recommend this book to most readers. (If time-travel books bother you, this won't change your opinion.) It is a good, hard-to-put down read. And at the end, you're exhausted by all the travel!


Half perfection, half deeply flawed.   May 19, 2004
Traveler (New England)
176 out of 249 found this review helpful

For a first novel Audrey Niffenegger has done a wonderful job of creating a new and interesting perspective on time travel using a love story as the foreground.

The first half of the book was absolutely stupendous. Niffenegger sets up her premise and you get pulled into her world. It was at this point that I thought I would be recommending this book to everyone and buying extra copies for my friends for Christmas.

And then things began to fail to add up or were just disturbing. (Spoiler alert.)

Niffenegger creates certain rules (as required by most sci-fi/fantasy) for her world. Henry, the time traveler, can't really change things, he can only really observe. Then, when the plot requires it and Clare needs more space in their house, he wins the lottery. This brings out several problems. One, if he can do that, why can't he do other things? Two, if he can be rich, why can't he affect things outside of his life such as people who are destitute, charities or political causes? And why don't these issues even come up - does he even care? And three, the lottery is brought up and then . . . forgotten.

This pattern occurs again when Henry seeks medical attention. We're drawn in as he convinces his doctor (who smokes in his office - give me a break!) to treat him and study his DNA. And then we have to wait 100+ pages as Niffenegger follows Clare's obsession with having a baby over several years. What's Henry's doctor doing to treat Henry? We don't know because we're not shown.

Both Clare and Henry, in the latter half of the novel, are presented in a rather flawed manner.

Henry is confronted with his own mortality, more so than most humans. But does he discuss it, think about it, reveal the details to his loved ones as he should do? Not really.

Clare on the other hand becomes downright selfish and obsessed in the second half. She betrays one of her best friends not just once, but twice. There's an annoying scene where she tries to "protect" Alba, her daughter, from medical assistance against Henry's wishes when he so obviously knows what's best far better than she does. And then there's the ending in which we are given nothing about Clare's life after Henry's departure. It's as if her life was nothing without him. She did nothing, accomplished nothing.

The book reminded me at the end of "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte. A compliment of sorts. But like "Heights," "The Time Traveler's Wife" is about an unhealthy expression of love and obsession.

One of the things that felt so odd about the book was it's lack of involvement with the outside world. It seems unlikely that Henry's actions would be so ignored by the government. Wouldn't someone catch on, start investigating, and then want in on the action? Wouldn't Henry's friends be more persistant about getting help, especially about money? Wouldn't both Henry and Clare be interested in helping others with Henry's knowledge? It's as if Clare and Henry are living in their own cocoon because none of these issues are really brought up.

Overall, Niffenegger makes the mistake of having "idiot plot" devices control her story. Why is something there? It's there because the plot demands it, not because it fits with the characters or the real story.

All of this is such a shame given the book's first half which just glowed with promise. Despite all these criticisms, it's still a good read. It's just not going to be a classic.


HOW CAN ANYONE LIKE THIS PRETENTIOUS SELF-SATISFIED DRIVEL?   January 13, 2004
Marc A. Weiner (Bloomington, IN USA)
134 out of 181 found this review helpful

Why is this book so popular? Is it the plot-premise of a romantic relationship between a man who uncontrollably travels through time-leaving and returning to the present without warning-and the more chronologically anchored woman who loves him, or is it perhaps something else entirely? I was lulled into buying this book by the many enthusiastic reviews it has received, but found it to be not only a waste of time, but annoying as well. This must be one of the most pretentious novels I've ever read. All of the characters act and sound like refugees from an episode of Friends or Seinfeld, a group of oh-so-cool, oh-so-well-educated, exquisitely cultured, insouciant and--wow, really neat!--yuppies in their mid-thirties who all speak with the same voice, quote an endless string of Rilke poems, make references to Foucault and Heidegger, name-drop and cite passages from their favorite belletristic authors, listen to everything under the sun from the trendiest, coolest punk music to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, eat in the newest ethnic restaurants (Thai seems to be a special favorite), and exhibit inexhaustible sexual energy while igniting overwhelming desire in all those around them. The novel reads like a compilation of cultural clichés, from the title character's experiences while traveling through time (like the human in the first Terminator movie, he arrives nauseous, naked, and exhibits sprinter-like athleticism), to countless other scenes in each of which the author has him cite some literary quote obviously intended to make him appear exquisitely educated (one particularly egregious examples is one scene in which he quotes--get ready to be impressed-Hamlet's "Had I but world enough and timeý.").

Though certainly unintended, the book strikes one as a satirical postmodernist version of Love Story, albeit with a twist: this time it's the girl whose family is incredibly wealthy (of course they live in a Frank Lloyd Wright-like mansion), while the guy's parents are less well-to-do, but also uniquely impressive: the author's imagination would not allow her main character's deceased mother to be just any old Hausfrau-no, she had to be a young, beautiful, Metropolitan Opera diva, and his bereaved father not just some normal, nine-to-five type of guy, but no less than the principal violinist of the New York Philharmonic. Everyone in this group of shallow, narcissistic intellectual wannabes speaks with the same voice and thinks with the same, impoverished, cliché-ridden imagination, and each thereby emerges as little more than a two-dimensional player in a larger, stereotypical ensemble design (and hence, again, as a fictional distant cousin of the casts of TV sit-coms); we have the rugged, iconoclastic young man (a heart-throb and heart-breaker of countless unfortunate women-sound like Ted Danson to anyone?), the middle-class princess (an object of desire for all who see her, men and women alike-perhaps they can cast Jennifer Aniston in the role if this is ever made into a movie), their male best friend who, though married, also lusts after Clare, his flip and savvy wife, their gay acquaintance who, of course, is dying of AIDS (Robert Downey, Jr., could play this guy), etc. etc.

While the manifest content of this self-satisfied text appears to descend from the liberalism of the late 1960s, its implied conservative ideology is located in the traditional image of the nuclear family, the sanctity of which is repeated over and over again in the book and is central to such other (and in this respect similar, though cinematic) examples of popular culture of the last twenty years as Woody Allen's Hannah and her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors, Fatal Attraction, and virtually all of Spielberg's most popular films. Perhaps that is the key to this shallow novel's success: It manages to appeal to the pseudo-intellectual tastes of an aging and despairing generation of liberals even as it reinforces the foundations of a society that no longer dares hope for political change, and instead has retreated into the more modest sphere of domestic bliss. I don't know what is scarier: the fact that this book is so completely lacking in any ironic awareness of its own pretentious make-up, that it has been received with such praise, or that, as the publishers proudly inform us, this is the author's first novel. Perhaps it's a good thing that time-travel remains an element of fictioný.


Beautifully written!   April 5, 2004
Monica Morgan (Galloway, NJ United States)
99 out of 112 found this review helpful

I stumbled across this book by mistake and hesitated to read it simply because it was 518 pages. To my surprise, I devoured this book in a few days and felt a pang of sadness when it was finished. The author crafts a story of something that is quite unbelievable and yet deftly makes it so very believable. I was hooked after the first chapter. Niffenegger managed to suck me in to this story so that I felt emotionally bound to the characters and their plight. It's a tragic story that weaves so much love/pain/joy/disappointment that it fairly bursts with emotion. Read it!