The Sheila Variations

The Books: "The Time Traveler's Wife" (Audrey Niffenegger)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

This is not my kind of book. I never would have picked it up on my own, for multiple reasons:

1. It's "popular fiction" - and for a while there the book was EVERYWHERE, and usually I don't like books like that (Nicholas Sparks, Tuesdays with Morrie, and etc. etc. - although I have been ringingly wrong in this department before, and am not afraid to admit it. But, in general, if it's so popular that everyone is reading it, it is usually not my cup of tea.

2. It's a first novel by the author. In general, I stay away from first novels - unless it's an author who has proved him/herself with a bunch of other books and then I go BACK to check out the first novel. Now, there are exceptions of course to this - here, or here - and thank God I read Nancy Lemann's first novel (and I read it first of all of her books) - because her books and her writing and her outlook on life have become SO important to me now .... in the warp and weft, as it were. But in general. I don't read first novels.

3. It seemed too soulmate-y. This is obviously totally subjective (but duh - why on earth would anyone look for "objectivity" -whatever that means - on a personal website??) - and I just am not into that stuff. It seemed like it might go the way of Nicholas Sparks' stuff - which is not just boring but horribly written. Or maybe it would be well-written ... but too much about love conquering all, and timeless soul-time continuums, and meeting in the space-time ether, and souls communing ... I was into that stuff once upon a time, but now I find it almost unbearable. My mega-essays on soulmates and Richard Bach are here, here, and here. Again, if you're into soulmate stuff, then please do not get defensive. It is ridiculous to get defensive when someone is expressing her subjective opinion. It shouldn't touch your opinion at all, unless you're interested in having it be touched. So. Okay. I'm against that soulmate stuff.

Now. I've talked about my reasons for resisting the book.

Then something kind of extraordinary happened. A dear friend of mine told me I had to read the book. And here's the thing: my friend has never recommended a book to me in her life. She doesn't really read. Or - she reads for information - you know, job applications, and health books, and stuff like that ... but to sit down and read for pleasure is just not her thing. So it was stunning. She had gone on a vacation all by herself, to the Cape - and someone had left a copy of The Time Traveler's Wife behind in the motel room - so what the hell, she was all alone, she picked it up - and read it. All the way through. That was all she did for about 3 days. She'd lie in bed reading. She'd sit on the beach reading. I know my friend very well - and just the way she told me this story, I could tell what a HUGE deal it was. Reading?? For pleasure??? You?? She has a lot of guilt about free time and stuff like that, always feels like she needs to be doing something and reading doesn't count. But she got lost in The Time Traveler's Wife. And she couldn't WAIT to talk to me about it - because there are epigraphs through the book - and one of them was from Possession and she knew how much I loved Possession, so she thought maybe I would like this book. Anyway, I have friends who recommend me books all the time. It's a give and take thing. My siblings, David, Allison, Kate, Mitchell, Ted ... but this friend? She would NEVER have recommended me a book - so it was a big deal. And she actually had bought me a copy so that I could read it. Well. I dropped whatever I was reading, and picked up Time Traveler's Wife - not so much because I suddenly ached to read it - but because this was a big moment ... a moment when a friend was asking to share something with me, and it was not at all casual ... a singular moment ... It was important to me to respond immediately. I don't feel like I'm describing what a big deal it was for this particular friend to recommend a book to me and why I felt obligated (terrible word - think about "obligation" in the beautiful sense of the word, and you will know where I was at) to read it immediately - even though I didn't think it was my cup of tea.

NOW. ONTO THE BOOK. FINALLY.

I absolutely LOVED it. I loved the writing, I loved the story, I loved the Chicago setting, I loved the humor of it (the book REALLY gets what it's like to be in Chicago when you're in your 20s), and I also loved more than anything its lack of sentimentality. Niffenegger uses sentimentality very sparingly, and I so appreciated it. It's not a "this was my great love once upon a time and let us all weep for what I have lost" kind of thing ... it's not suffused with bittersweet melancholy, or a kitsch version thereof. It's about a guy who - for some unknown reason - has the ability to leap through time. He's been doing it since he was a kid. So imagine Sam Beckett of Quantum Leap leaping through time on his own - and then returning home - knowing the future, the past, what's going to happen - and then leaping out again. He never knows where he's going to land (although, like Quantum Leap, it's always within his own lifetime. Also, just to throw a wrench into the works - a horrible wrench - whenever he leaps, he finds himself stark naked in the new time and place. Naked! He could land in the middle of Michigan Avenue during a big shopping day - NAKED. So he becomes expert at how to handle this - he knows where every thrift store is in the city, he knows how to rummage through garbage for a coat, shoes - he knows what to do first. And during one of his leaps - Henry meets a little girl named Clare. She is curious about him. She runs into her house to get him clothes from her father. Henry is a grown man when he first meets Clare - although in reality they are closer to the same age. So it's this weird time-wrinkle thing ... where Henry is a little boy, and he leaps into himself at age 35 or whatever ... and he knows the end. He knows that he and Clare eventually get married. And they have problems. They have a deep love. There is much to struggle against and work out ... but he still, with all this prior knowledge, has to go through with the courtship, the romance ... he loves her dearly. But the time travel thing is so much a part of his life and he can't count on it, or plan for it ... sometimes he returns to their apartment, and he's lying in the hallway, battered and bloody from something that happened back there in the past. Clare has to accept this part of him. She is "the time traveler's wife". The story is told from both points of view - we leap back and forth from Henry to Clare - and the story is broken up into the dates and the ages - which gives you a dizzying sense of travel, and disorientation, the way it must be for Henry. Like: April 12, 1984. Henry is 36, Clare is 12. So you start to ache for them to "catch up" with each other, to bridge the gap ... to have Henry come closer in time to Clare's age ... so they can actually connect. It's a huge burden on Henry. To know the future. It gives him a great sadness that hovers around him. He's an odd guy. And Clare is wonderful.

I think the book is maybe 100 pages too long ... that's my only complaint - BUT - the ending packed such a huge punch that I almost had to go lie down. It ended so perfectly, on such a resonant symmetrical note - I thought: Yes. Of course. That's where we have been going all this time ... Of course.

It's a helluva first novel, I have to say. Niffenegger writes with great confidence, sweeping her characters through the landscape - and I just loooove the FEEL of Chicago she gets into the book. Clare is in Chicago, in her mid-20s - during the mid-1990s - which is when I lived there, and the age I was when I lived there. The clubs mentioned - Berlin! Aragon! - Niffenegger is obsessed with Chicago, and it becomes another character in the book. I could SEE every scene - the intersections, the specific place-names - Ann Sather, etc. It's got a great sense of place. Clare and Henry, to me, feel very Chicago-ish. They are locals. It's obvious.

Loved the book. I was nervous when I heard they were making a movie of it - scared that it might be ruined - or made too maudlin or treacly - but then I heard that Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana were starring - and I thought: Well. Now I can't WAIT to see it.

The book is so episodic and almost frantic in its pace - that I found a hard time picking an excerpt. I decided to go with the following. One of the best things about it is that it displays Niffenegger's sense of WHIMSY - how romance is so often silly and whimsical - that couples have private jokes, a way of being with each other - that is not lovey-dovey ... but simple enjoyment ... I love that about the book, and the way she writes it.

EXCERPT FROM The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

March 1994 (Clare is 22, Henry is 30)

CLARE: And so we are married. At first we live in a two-bedroom apartment in a two-flat in Ravenswood. It's sunny, with butter-colored hardwood floors and a kitchen full of antique cabinets and antiquated appliances. We buy things, spend Sunday afternoons in Crate & Barrel exchanging wedding presents, order a sofa that can't fit through the doors of the apartment and has to be sent back. The apartment is a laboratory in which we conduct experiments perform research on each other. We discover that Henry hates it when I absentmindedly click my spoon against my teeth while reading the paper at breakfast. We agree that it is okay for me to listen to Joni Mitchell and it is okay for Henry to listen to the Shaggs as long as the other person isn't around. We figure out that Henry should do all the cooking and I should be in charge of laundry and neither of us is willing to vacuum so we hire a cleaning service.

We fall into a routine. Henry works Tuesdays through Saturdays at the Newberry. He gets up at 7:30 and starts the coffee, then throws on his running clothes and goes for a run. When he gets back he showers and dresses, and I stagger out of bed and chat with him while he fixes breakfast. After we eat, he brushes his teeth and speeds out the door to catch the El, and I go back to bed and doze for an hour or so.

When I get up again the apartment is quiet. I take a bath and comb my hair and put on my work clothes. I pour myself another cup of coffee, and I walk into the back bedroom which is my studio, and I close the door.

I am having a hard time, in my tiny back bedroom studio, in the beginning of my married life. The space that I can call mine, that isn't full of Henry, is so small that my ideas have become small. I am like a caterpillar in a cocoon of paper; all around me are sketches for sculptors, small drawings that seem like moths fluttering against the windows, beating their wings to escape from the tiny space. I make maquettes, tiny sculptures that are rehearsals for huge sculptures. Every day the ideas come more reluctantly, as though they know I will starve them and stunt their growth. At night I dream about color, about submerging my arms into vats of paper fiber. I dream about miniature gardens I can't set foot in because I am a giantess.

The compelling thing about making art - or making anything, I suppose - is the moment when the vaporous, insubstantial idea becomes a solid there, a thing, a substance in a world of substances. Circe, Nimbue, Artemis, Athena, all the old sorceresses: they must have known the feeling as they transformed men into fabulous creatures, stole the secrets of the magicians, disposed armies: ah, look, there it is, the new thing. Call it a swine, a war, a laurel tree. Call it art. The magic I can make is small magic now, deferred magic. Every day I work, but nothing ever materializes. I feel like Penelope, weaving and unweaving.

And what of Henry, my Odysseus? Henry is an artist of another sort, a disappearing artist. Our life together in this too-small apartment is punctuated by Henry's small absences. Sometimes he disappears unobtrusively; I might be walking from the kitchen into the hall and find a pile of clothing on the floor. I might get out of bed in the morning, and find the shower running and no one in it. Sometimes it's frightening. I am working in my studio one afternoon when I hear someone moaning outside my door; when I open it I find Henry on his hands and knees, naked, in the hall, bleeding heavily from his head. He opens his eyes, sees me, and vanishes. Sometimes I wake up in the night and Henry is gone. In the morning he will tell me where he's been, the way other husbands might tell their wives a dream they had: "I was in the Selzer Library in the dark, in 1989." Or: "I was chased by a German Shepherd across somebody's backyard and had to climb up a tree." Or: "I was standing in the rain near my parents' apartment, listening to my mother sing." I am waiting for Henry to tell me that he has seen me as a child, but so far this hasn't happened. When I was a child I looked forward to seeing Henry. Every visit was an event. Now every absence is a nonevent, a subtraction, an adventure I will hear about when my adventurer materializes at my feet, bleeding or whistling, smiling or shaking. Now I am afraid when he is gone.

HENRY: When you live with a woman you learn something every day. So far I have learned that long hair will clog up the shower drain before you can say "Liquid-Plumr"; that it is not advisable to clip something out of the newspaper before your wife has read it, even if the newspaper in question is a week old; that I am the only person in our two-person household who can eat the same thing for dinner three nights in a row without pouting; and that headphones were invented to preserve spouses from each other's musical excesses. (How can Clare listen to Cheap Trick? Why does she like the Eagles? I'll never know, because she gets all defensive when I ask her. How can it be that the woman I love doesn't want to listen to Musique du Garrot et de la Farraille?) The hardest lesson is Clare's solitude. Sometimes I come home and Clare seems kind of irritated; I've interrupted some train of thought, broken into the dreamy silence of her day. Sometimes I see an expression on Clare's face that is like a closed door. She has gone inside the room of her mind and is sitting there knitting or something. I've discovered that Clare likes to be alone. But when I return from time traveling she is always relieved to see me.

When the woman you live with is an artist, every day is a surprise. Clare has turned the second bedroom into a wonder cabinet, full of small sculptures and drawings pinned up on every inch of wall space. There are coils of wire and rolls of paper tucked into shelves and drawers. The sculptures remind me of kites, or model airplanes. I say this to Clare one evening, standing in the doorway of her studio in my suit and tie, home from work, about to begin making dinner, and she throws one at me; it flies surprisingly well, and soon we are standing at opposite ends of the hall, tossing tiny sculptures at each other, testing their aerodynamics. The next day I come home to find that Clare has created a flock of paper and wire birds, which are hanging from the ceiling in the living room. A week later our bedroom windows are full of abstract blue translucent shapes that the sun throws across the room onto the walls, making a sky for the bird shapes Clare has painted there. It's beautiful.

The next evening I'm standing in the doorway of Clare's studio, watching her finish drawing a thicket of black lines around a little red bird. Suddenly I see Clare, in her small room, closed in by all of her stuff, and I realize that she's trying to say something, and I know what I have to do.

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