From the National Book Award-winning author, a novel about a defiant young woman in near-future dystopian America who is sentenced to hard time in the 1950s Midwest.
Some of the inconsistencies, unfortunately, feel like copy-editing gaffes ... In a novel this tricky, the accuracy of the smallest detail counts ... Hazards of Time Travel can be labeled science fiction, but it’s also a memory-book on the sly. Oates earned her MA at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1961, and her vivid recollections of the place come in handy for evoking Adriane’s profound culture shock in fictional Wainscotia ... Hazards of Time Travel is, among other things, an artful meditation on the gulf between subjective experience and clinically observable behavior. It’s also a wily, shape-shifting tale that only reveals its true colors in its final pages.
... engrossing ... The story’s ominous sense of puppet masters pulling strings is heightened by frequent references to the behaviorism that Adriane and Wolfman study ... The time travel allows Oates to chalk up her one officially dystopian novel while spending more than three quarters of it in naturalistic settings with more than a few passing parallels to Oates’s life ... [a] strange, piercing novel...
Oates has always said that her primary interest is in personality. A writer like Atwood takes great joy in world-building, but for Oates it’s a chore to be dispensed with. And so the Cliffs Notes-like introduction is a frantic scrabble to get back into charted territory ... The novel’s underdescribed future, with its hints at totalitarian politics, doesn’t play to Oates’s strengths as a nostalgia artist, her ability to abruptly evoke a bygone era with a teenager’s pink plastic hairbrush, a mother’s black net gloves. At her best, her worlds, however violent, feel lovingly considered. The futuristic one in Hazards of Time Travel feels hastily made ... But the world she imagines is rigorously believable, its every twist underlined and circled. Oates evokes a future made from the ingredients of the present: televisions and internet access, cellphones and broken government. She doesn’t try to stretch the limits of what we know, or what we might become. That’s a task for an Atwood, perhaps.
