The Time Traveler's Wife

Rating:
Summary: It is not linear, but it is beautiful
Review: Very rarely do I find myself amazed by the narrative mechanics of a novel. By prose, yes, often, but not usually by the author's ability to manage and maintain diverse plot strands. This book amazed me. Naturally enough for a book about time travel, its sense of chronological order is hopelessly skewed- and yet, that's not a problem. Niffenegger organizes the book in such a way that everything makes sense, every twist, every turn, every jaunt to 1979 or 1999 or 2011.

It is by turns funny and sad. Niffenegger has a wonderful feel for comic dialogue that is both entertaining and realistic. Her prose is crisp; sparse, yet not lifeless. The characters are well-defined and real; good people, but not perfect, and torn by the terrible tragedies of their lives. More than any other writer I have encountered she engages with the emotional issues inherent in time travel. What does it mean to know what the future is? Can love transcend time? Would an out-of-order romance be better or worse, happier or sadder, than love in linear time?

The disjointed chronology also allows a potent sense of dramatic irony. The audience knows things that the time traveler doesn't know, he knows things they don't know, his wife has secrets from them both . . . it should be a mishmash, and yet it's an elegant tapestry, heartbreakingly real for all its science fiction conceit. I have said little about the plot. This is as it should be. Do not drown yourself in details before you pick the book up. Let it all be a mystery to you, as so much is to the characters, as they travel through time on roads straight and curved.