The Time Traveler's Wife

Author: Audrey Niffenegger

I am not usually a fan of stories that include time travel, or alternate dimensions, or multiple realities (as you can imagine, I am comic book challenged), and so I picked up this particular novel a few times and then said, "Nyehh" and put it back down. Once I actually committed to reading it, however, I got sucked in almost immediately. While this is, obviously, a story about time travel, the author manages to avoid most of the things that usually annoy me about this plot device.
The story switches back and forth between the perspectives of Henry, the time traveler, and Clare, his wife, as they navigate through four decades of courtship and marriage. What might otherwise be a fairly conventional love story is made unique by Henry's time travel, which allows him to meet Clare as a little girl, to visit her as a teenager, and creates a slightly confusing but intriguing scenario in which Henry, meeting the adult Clare for the first time, finds that she has known him for most of her life, since his future self has been visiting her past self throughout her early life, although he has no memory of her because he hasn't actually met her yet. Confused? Yeah, that's why I don't like time travel as a plot device.
Audrey Niffenegger does have a better grasp on her story than many who try for the alternate dimensions of time/space/reality, though, and she sidesteps a lot of the problems that often crop up with plots getting tangled. Each chapter is prefaced with an italicised line telling us what year it is and how old Henry and Clare are at the time, which eases the back-and-forth jet lag. (I did get confused and have to page back once or twice, to remind me who was talking and how old they were at the time, but I have two young children and I don't sleep much, so I am easily befuddled.) It is also made very clear early on that Henry cannot alter anything that happens by going back in time. He can't take anything with him when he time travels; he vanishes from his present, appears naked in past and future moments, and then reappears naked in his present life again. He can witness and rewitness accidents, poor choices, suicides, etc., but once they have occurred a certain way, they cannot be manipulated. This makes Henry an often tormented soul, which gives him and his situation some humanity. It also neatly avoids a lot of what I like to call the "Terminator/Back To The Future" syndrome -- where the future can make the past happen differently, which would make the future different, which would mean that the future that affected the past never happened, in which case how did it affect the past and create the new future?... and at this point I get a headache and go lie down. There are a few instances where the author violates her own rules, or at least does things that make me sit all squinty-eyed for a long time and think about whether the rules have been violated or not. Henry can, for example, win the lottery by seeing the winning numbers in the future and then buying a winning ticket in the past. Or present. Whatever.
Mostly, though, this story works in spite of the occasional time travel headache, because the author does not rely exclusively on the time travel to make her story interesting. Clare and Henry are characters with a great deal of depth, and their love story, despite its bumpy narrative that goes back and forth through four decades, feels very human and real. In many ways, they are simply a couple dealing with an unfortunate chronic disease, and most of what they go through is very relatable. I don't think that I could give this book two thumbs up, but I could give it a very solid thumb and a half. (I have been debating whether I need a rating system for books -- you know, three out of four stars or whatever. I was leaning toward not, but I'm not so sure about leaving everyone with the gruesome image of half a thumb, either. Feel free to let me know your thoughts.)