The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Wow, what a book. I'm going to try very hard to keep this post at a normal length, but that won't be easy. I'm 287 pages through this 536 page book, and thoughts just keep popping up.

To sum the plot up in a couple sentences, Henry DeTamble is a librarian that has a medical condition in which is involuntarily snaps to different places in time and then eventually snaps back. As he matures, he can get further and further away from the present and travelling to the past is easier than travelling to the future where, "the air is thin." Clare Abshire is some "beautiful artbabe" from a rich dysfunctional family who is visited by Henry from the age of 6 in the "Meadow". He reveals to her that eventually they will be married, so Clare is already deeply in love (and in lust which is so wrong in so many ways since she's a teenager and he's in his 30's/40's while he visits her) with him by the time they actually meet when she's 20 and he's 28.

Wow, that paragraph is pretty big already... I guess I'll only be able to talk about a couple things that strike me about this book.

a) Nifenegger (what a name...) has let her restraint get away from her and has created a book full of impossibly beautiful people. It makes the book less realistic in my opinion. I'm not saying that she even needs to make anyone really ugly, she should just refrain from describing people physically unless it's really important to the story. For an example, it would be okay for her to describe Clare's hair (long, rich, thick, coppery, and utterly perfect of course...) because Henry likes talking about it. Fine, whatever, it has something to do with the plot. But her obsession with making Henry impossibly beautiful who takes after his mother who is ravishing and his ex-girlfriend who is practically a supermodel just gets a little annoying. I remember when I was about 10 I liked to write stories where everyone was breath-takingly beautiful. As I am no longer a child, I don't do that anymore.

b) I'm not totally convinced with the love story. Every critique on the book is about what a "dizzyingly romantic" story it is, but I'm not really feeling it. Maybe we're supposed to feel uncertain about it, because they never really chose each other, it just kind of happened. Future Henry came to Past Clare with the knowledge that they would be together, and they did...just because they would. That sentence is not supposed to make sense, because time travel never makes sense. I wonder when authors/screenplay writers will get over it and realize that a really great story can't come about when the backdrop to it is an imbroglio.

c) One thing I really like about this book is Gomez, the polish attorney who wants "the revolution" and has the violently idealistic quality of many other fictional just-out-university city dwellers. He has a kind of faux-flirtatious protective feeling for Clare which somehow makes him more sympathetic to me than Henry. Of course, he's also impossibly beautiful. I don't know what the author was thinking when she wrote this book...