The Time Traveler's Wife

Given the title, I just had to read the book. The story is remarkable by virtue of portraying Henry's (the time traveller) and Clare's (the wife) asynchronous encounters, with flashbacks that aren't always flashbacks, because more often than not, we are with the time traveller in the past. I'm not quite sure what to call the ventures into the future.The focus of the story is the development of Henry's and Clare's love for each other, with the usual philosophical wonderings about predestination clipped due to definitive answers. (The timeline is fixed, so even when future Henry comes into the past, he cannot change it, even if he remembers that his future self did something wrong.) The story tends toward the bittersweet, because it follows through the entire life story, spanning decades, rather than limiting itself to the earlier years where time travel is more intriguing than troublesome.The story cannot be considered science fiction, in spite of the time travelling. The "scientific" explanation for the time travel is a genetic one. (For the geeks out there, he's a mutant, but never gains control of his super-power.) This fails as a hard SciFi explanation, and largely fails as a literary explanation. If there were such a gene, one would at least expect the author to allude to ghost stories or other unexplained phenomena and try to demonstrate that this story device plausibly explains them, nor does the the author pause to ponder other consequences of having a small fraction of the population able to involuntarily time travel. No, the science behind the primary story device just sits there, only occasionally driving the story.There are casual scientific errors (of real factual science) that neither the author nor her editors caught. Lake Michigan is spoken of having "tides." (Lake levels rise and fall due to rain, drainage and evaporation, but cannot have tides as ocean shores do.) A man is described as being so nearsighted that his glasses magnify his eyes to be very large. (Nearsighted people's glasses make their eyes appear smaller, not bigger.)I mention these because SciFi readers will be attracted by the title of the book, and are generally intrigued by how an author takes fantastic concepts and makes them seem plausible. There is no effort on that part in this book, at least to the degree that a SciFi reader would expect.This is a story about people, in particular a love story, that is oddly romanticized by the concept of the wife having met her husband from the future as early as age 6. The background of the characters is very "artsy," which will also tend to disuade fans of the SciFi genre, who are looking for adventure and fantasy, not literary allusions, metaphors and references.For those who are not fans of the SciFi genre, this story is a good introduction into why so many people do become fans of SciFi: the possibilities for answering the question "what if?" expand dramatically, and add intruiguing twists to stories that would otherwise be little more than cliches: "Boy meets girl" becomes "Boy meets girl ... er, um, no ... girl meets boy, then boy meets girl, ...no that isn't quite it either ..."My 3-star rating is based on my personal enjoyment of the book, and hence my warning to fellow SciFi geeks. The romantic aspects of the book, plus the time travel, are intruiguing, and I do enjoy them, but I am used to authors dealing with the plausibility of the primary SciFi device far more adeptly. The story arc is somewhat depressing, which means I'll not be rereading it, since I don't enjoy depressing entertainment, no matter how meaningful and realistic it is.

THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE is not your typical H.G. Wells time traveler book. It's more of a relationship novel. Henry DeTamble, the main character, is suffering from a genetic defect that causes him to disappear into the past, or future, when he suffers from stress. He has no control over where he will go. Most of the time he journeys back in time to see his future wife, Clare Abshire, starting when she was only six, or his mother who died in an accident when he was a boy. The two leader characters are extremely well-rounded and there are a number of likable minor characters, including Kimmy, Henry's father's Korean next door neighbor. Niffennegger has employed that writer's adage, "write about what you know" quite well. She is a professor in the M.F.A. program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts. Clare Abshire is a sculptress who makes her own paper and Niffennegger takes us through the process in several engrossing scenes. Henry is a librarian who works in Special Collections at the Newberry Library in Chicago. His father is a violinist and his mother was an opera singer. Although not much of a musician himself, Henry is also a punk rock devotee and Niffennegger weaves minutia about this musical form into the narrative. Some people may be distracted, or even angered, by the book's unusual structure. Henry is forty when he first meets Clare, but he's twenty-eight when he meets her in real time with no memory of the previous meeting. Huh? you say. So did I for quite a bit of the book, until it grew on me. Niffennegger also toys with scientific plausibility as Henry often goes back in time where he confronts himself. In one especially bizarre scene he even has sex with himself (As a teenager, his partner is only a few months older). Eventually I realized that the book would not work, especially the ending, if Niffennegger wasn't granted this bit of poetic license. This book is funny, sad, and tragic in different degrees. Henry can't take anything with him when he time travels and arrives naked. He gets caught naked, running around in the stacks at the Newberry. Meanwhile Clare, who loves him as Heloise loved Abelard, patiently waits and always forgives. If you're looking for something different, you can't go wrong with the TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE.

After I finished The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, this book was recommended to me. I managed to make it to the end, but it wasn’t my cup of tea. Or coffee. It was intriguing with the time travel, but very tedious. And I didn’t appreciate the ending much. But, I would say because of the theme, I’m glad I read it.

The unique time-jumping format of this book in itself kept me engaged, but the real genius of the book is the relationship between the two main characters. They seem to represent just what a person would be looking for in a mate, and it’s satisfying. Even in their faults, they are perfect. But somehow what happens between them is continually surprising. It’s partly because of the time travel, which would be surprising in any form in our real lives. And it’s partly Henry’s disarming sense of humor. But the heart of the surprisingness is all the ways they express the continual love between them. It’s interesting how they solve the problems that time travel presents to them. Sometimes it’s shocking what they have to go through and it creates a strong bond between the reader and the characters. You feel honored that you are allowed to share these sometimes horrific and sometimes beautiful circumstances, and you feel as though you really understand the characters because of the emotion you experience as you go with them into shocking situations. Anyone would be justifiably devastated by what happens to them, but they handle it so gracefully. I believe the book was titled after Clare, the wife, because it is her unassuming acceptance of a time traveling husband that makes everything work. It is her willing suspension of disbelief and the depth of her innocent love that makes it possible for Henry to live a “normal“ time traveling life. The story makes you think of possibilities in your own life, even though you know there’s no chance you will ever time travel.

I am going to try to write this review without giving too much away. Despite seeming somewhat negative below, I want to make it clear, that for about 80% of this book, I enjoyed it very much, thus justifying my 4 stars.I am one that usually loves time travel books and/or movies. I must admit this one was the most complex with multiple journeys back and forth across time.One might think by reading my title that the time travel itself is what left me confused. However, it was inconsistencies with the characters and/or circumstances that left me a bit perplexed.For example, the author made it very clear that Henry did not have any control over when he would time travel or what time frame he would be traveling to. Yet, towards the end of the book, Clare is wondering why Henry is only “visiting” their daughter and very rarely “chooses” to visit with her. If Henry’s condition was triggered purely by his own genetic deficiencies, it is hard for me to believe that he wouldn’t have appeared to Clare more often in her later life, even if he didn’t want to hurt her any further.Another thing that was mentioned was that Henry’s time traveling is often triggered when he is under extreme stress. While there were plenty of examples that corroborated this fact, like his mother’s death or on the morning of his wedding, I also remember him time traveling very randomly. I might be confusing the book with the movie, but I remember that he time traveled for a second time on the night of his wedding, when the stress of the day was over, also at times when they were just talking (like in the movie when he was carrying the dinner dishes to the table). These inconsistencies didn’t stop me from enjoying their story, it just made me wonder.Speaking of the movie, I saw it first and chose to read the book, because books are usually better. While I did enjoy some of the book’s details that the movie didn’t have time to explore (like some of the scenes with Henry and Clare’s families), I do agree with some other reviewers who felt that the book was a little too vulgar, too long, and presented situations that were totally unnecessary to the main plot. I also didn’t care for the stereotypical portrayal of people of different ethnicities.As a result, I actually enjoyed the movie more in this case. While I would have liked some more details that weren’t explained in the movie (which is why I chose to read the book), I felt that most of the details that were in the book and not in the movie were just extraneous, and were not pivotal to the main plot. I also felt the movie did a really great job editing out not only the boring and cumbersome parts that made the book “drag” at times, but also some of the crude and insensitive plot devices that I felt stripped away some of the romance that was present in the movie.If I was going to read a 500+ page bookI would have liked some extra character development for both Henry and Clare rather than endless descriptions of punk bands, museum exhibits, grocery lists, as well as secondary character crushes that only seemed to weaken Henry and Clare’s bond with each other rather than to strengthen it.In conclusion, I would say if you loved the book, the movie might be disappointing. However, if you are a hopeless romantic, but found the book a little “too rough around the edges”, I would suggest giving the movie a try. It really does bring out the beauty of Henry and Clare’s love, without offending the senses.