The Time Traveler's Wife

Audrey Niffenegger

Scale of 1-10: 8
Pros: Strong, well-developed characters; makes beautiful use of language without getting too purple or verbose
Cons: A tad long, sometimes hard to follow

Synopsis: Time-traveling Henry DeTamble meets his wife-to-be, Clare Abshire, when he is 28 and she is 20. She meets him when she is 6 and he is 36. She lives life linearly, he lives it as a jumbled mishmash of random hops and jumps throughout his also somewhat linear life. At its heart, this is a book about true love, but it's also about destiny.

My take:
I really enjoyed Niffenegger's story, though I did find it a tad long. The prose is beautiful, and only every once in a while fails to fit the telling - once or twice, I thought it was a bit too mature for the narrator's age at the time. Generally, though, it fits well and is descriptive without bogging down the reader in too much detail. The tale is told in chunks, from both Henry and Clare's points of view, now in the present, now in the past, always preceeded by date and the ages of both Henry and Clare during each vignette. That helps, but while the leaps back in time mostly follow chronological order, they don't always, so every once in a while, it get confusing. Likewise, every now and again, Niffenegger retells one of the jumps to the past in the present, and that can also be confusing. Mostly, it isn't, as she has been very careful to cover with enough detail for the reader to follow and remember, but every once in a while, I had to page back to remind myself what happened the first time, from the other character's point of view (generally, one character tells the story the first time, and then when it happens "again" in the present, the other character will tell his/her side of things).

I thought Niffenegger handled the subject of time travel really well, avoiding inconsistencies nicely and offering a reasonable explanation for the lack of effect Henry has on the future when he's traveling through the past. Which is where the destiny part of the telling comes into play. Perhaps part of the success in Niffenegger's explanation is a lack of detail; she does not bog herself down in lengthy explanations of how or why things happen and whether or not they can be changed. We get Henry's explanation of the facts as he sees them, and as they are as pragmatic as they are sketchy, I find myself willing to accept Niffenegger's version of time travel without real question.

My only real nits with the book were having to page back sometimes to remind myself what had happened before, and some of the scenes really only needed one telling, as Henry was the only character in them, from different times in his life. In addition, there is one very dramatic part of the book where Henry materializes in his own apartment while he, Clare, and some friends are all having dinner, but Niffenegger never explained why it happened or what was going on with the time-traveling Henry. I found that really aggravating, as the scene was really dramatic. I mean if you're going to drop a convulsing time-traveler into the middle of a dinner party, destroying a china cabinet (or something that sounded like a china cabinet) in the process, you might want to drop me a clue somewhere down the line telling me why the character was convulsing and what happened to him when he made it back to his own time, all sliced up from the broken glass and crockery he landed in. As well, since at no other point in the book does Henry displace solid objects when he "lands" in another time, I don't understand why he did then, either. Perhaps he only tripped and fell and knocked over the cabinet, but since Niffenegger never tells that part of the story from the time-traveling Henry's point of view, we'll never know. It really irked me that she never bothered to explain that scene. She also failed to adequately explain why when Henry travels to the future, he seems to avoid contact with Clare. That doesn't really make any sense to me, given the characters' love, and one or two sentences from Henry in the future would have sufficed to explain it. I find that a bit lazy on Niffenegger's part. Aside from those small things, however, I definitely enjoyed the book and am very glad I read it.