How did Audrey Niffenegger manage to do it? No, I am not asking how she managed to write such a fine novel (although The Time Traveler's Wife is a fine novel). Rather, how did she manage to write a story about time travel and keep it out of the black hole that passes for the science fiction section of your local book store? Why does she get to pass as an author of literary fiction, while the rest of the grunts are stuck in genre hell? And, most of all, how did she get the publisher to package the book with a tasteful, low-key cover, instead of the pulp fiction monstrosities that make all the other speculative fiction authors, from Asimov to Zelazny, look like cretins?
And she did it with a first novel! When Cormac McCarthy or Margaret Atwood write a sci-fi novel, I can understand the publisher trying to disguise the fact – after all, these authors have reputations to protect . But a first novelist writing about time travel, and showing up on the shelf between Nabokov and Ondaatje . . . Well, there is always a first time for everything.
Of course, Kurt Vonnegut showed decades ago, in Slaughterhouse Five , that time travel could be a useful concept in structuring a work of experimental fiction. Disruptions in chronology are a cherished tool of modernist writing. (Remember the Alain Robbe-Grillet novel where the character dies, and then shows up again in a later chapter? What, you haven’t read Robbe-Grillet? Ah, to be so lucky.) Niffenegger takes full advantage of the freedom given her by this structural device, telling the life story of Henry DeTamble in bits and piece that make a mockery of the usual start-to-finish framework of story-telling. Effects happen before their causes. Dead characters reappear (but much more smoothly than in Robbe-Grillet). The old becomes new and the new becomes old.
With a less skilled writer manning the keyboard, this intricate plan for sequencing and pacing the story might merely confuse and disrupt the flow of the work. But Niffenegger never forgets the human element in her tale. The Time Traveler’s Wife is, above all, a love story. At times, a strange and unprecedented love story – how often does the male lead, age 36, first meet his future wife, age 6, while standing stark naked in a meadow? This usually leads to an arrest, not romance. But Niffenegger pulls it off with a delicate touch. The romance of DeTamble and Clare Abshire is beautifully rendered – indeed, this is one of the most moving love stories I have read in recent years. Moreover, the unexpected sequencing imparts a wistful, nostalgic ambiance to their encounters that very much sui generis.
No, you won’t find it in the sci-fi section, but track it down anyway. By all means, pick up something by Nabokov and Ondaatje while you’ re browsing, but also pick up this exceptional effort by Niffenegger. And who knows? Maybe her next book will be about aliens or androids.