Book Review: The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Audrey Niffenegger’s novel about a romance between Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire is not particularly original. It’s been done a thousand times before. What makes Niffenegger’s version of boy meets girl is the backdrop of time travel that she involves to articulate certain aspects of their relationship. Henry, you see, is a time traveler, but he isn’t like Hiro Nakamura from “Heroes” or H.G. Well’s unnamed time traveler. Henry has a genetic mutation that causes him to travel through time against his will. When he disappears he takes nothing with him, not even the fillings in his teeth. He is drawn to certain places, however, like the accident scene where his mother died. Another place is the meadow behind Clare’s house, where she meets him for the first time at the age of six, when he’s already 36.

The time travel motif serves many purposes in the story. It serves as a metaphor for couples that have to live with a handicap or disease. They shape their lives and their relationships around it. They live with it, just as Clare has to live, however agonizing it might be, with being the one left behind. The storyline deals with the consequences seamlessly and the exploration of their lives from each of their perspectives easily lends “The Time Traveler’s Wife” a seamless realism. When Henry first meets Clare from his perspective, she’s already an adult and she’s known him for years, but he’s completely at a loss as to who she is.

The rest is simply the rest of their lives and the layers of complex connections that weave through them and the people that populate their world. The characters are realistic and the anguish they feel is poignant. Underneath the clever writing is a deeper question pertaining to determinism and free will. Is Henry, having been to the future, able to choose differently in his past? Does Clare, knowing the future, have some control over actions she creates in her present? 

Niffenegger handles expressions of loss and enduring time with deft, meaningful prose. She’s a great writer and this is one of the best debut novels I’ve read in a while. It’s a great piece of literature that easily lends itself for comparison to other works. Clare is likened to Penelope from the “Odyssey,” a comparison noted by critics and other reviewers. Henry, on the other hand, seems inspired by Billy Pilgrim from “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut. If you like this one, I really recommend reading “Slaughterhouse-Five” too.