Do you enjoy puzzles? Do you love it when all the pieces fit and you can view the complete picture? In a way, that is what you have with this novel. It is like a jigsaw puzzle.
This book is a love story with a twist. It is a strange tale. One must truly suspend unbelief to accept the time travel motif presented here. Watch as our main characters move in and out of time and interface with the other people in their lives. Watch as the minor characters move the plot along.
It is told in multiple viewpoints, both of them first person. We go back and forth from the voice of Claire and the voice of Henry, as well as back and forth in time. The writing style is easy to follow. The characters are well drawn.
It starts with a prologue where Claire, the wife, is waiting for Henry, the time traveler, to return. She can not follow him. She must stay and wait. This sets up the theme of loneliness, displacement and loss.
Maybe that is the feeling the author wants us to have when she structures the book into segments. This theme carries throughout the book. The time periods overlap. She foreshadows events; birth, loss, death. The foreshadowing is well done.
The story begins when Henry meets Claire. He is 28 and she is 20. He is a librarian and she is an artist. But she met him years before when she was six and he was 36. He doesn’t remember her. As time goes on he falls in love with her and they get married and have a child. And all the time he is time traveling.
Henry can’t help it. He is different from other men. He has something called Chrono- Displacement Disorder which is a condition that causes one to involuntarily travel through time. It is triggered in him by stress. It causes him to travel back to times of significance in his life.
In one instance he travels back to the moment his mother was killed. Another time to the moment of his death, which is the ultimate displacement, or is it?
The premise of this book is true love survives separation.
This book is one to be read slowly allowing the concepts to stimulate the mind.
Audrey Niffenegger is a professor in the MFA program at the Columbia College Center for Book and Paper Arts. She lives in Chicago. The “Time Traveler’s Wife” is her first novel.
This book is currently the Santa Monica Citywide Read for 2007. Free public discussions have been going on throughout the city, at the libraries as well as some coffee shops, and will conclude on May 19. For further information check the website www.smpl.org/cwr or call (310) 458-8600.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 3, 2007. Read the original PDF.