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.
Poor Adriane is never certain what’s happening to her, and anyone who reads Hazards of Time Travel is likely to feel the same way. At first, the story’s clunky political satire and feverish tone suggest the makings of a young-adult novel, but that’s another ruse. The plot quickly gets snarled up in B.F. Skinner’s theories of behaviorism, which the kids won’t find all that rewarding. Adults, though, may be intrigued to see Oates’s sly efforts to create a time-loop ... the story’s unpredictable shocks may reduce readers to a state of learned helplessness. Nothing — including a happy ending — is as it seems in this accelerating swirl of political and academic satire, science fiction and romantic melodrama. At 80, after more than 40 novels, Oates is still casting some awfully dark magic.
Audacious, chilling and darkly playful, her thought experiment about belonging and otherness is quick to ignite, but admirably slow to reveal the full extent of its dystopian proposition ... Adriane’s skippy, breathless first-person narration; her dashes, exclamation marks and broken sentences give the novel a slapdash quality. But its imaginative ambition, intellectual panache and propulsive story offer plenty of compensation ... Oates’s message is clear: any society that punishes exceptionalism in the name of egalitarianism is a dystopian one. In positing the real 'hazard' of otherness as exposure to the crushing contempt of a conformist majority, she is highlighting not so much the banality of evil as the evil of banality. As time-travelling, universally applicable propositions go, mediocre it is not.
Joyce Carol Oates’s Hazards of Time Travel is her 46th novel, which is in itself an astonishing achievement. It is a dystopian narrative in which the indomitable Oates seems to be flexing new muscles ... The extent to which you appreciate this novel will depend partly on how dystopia-friendly you are. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go might keep this book company were it not that they are more substantial nightmares. By comparison, this appears skeletal, super-intelligent, yet somehow depleted. It seems to have been written in an abbreviated rush, as though the fictional imperative of not saying too much had affected the telling of the story.
In many ways, Hazards of Time Travel is a too familiar book from page one. Its dystopian setup is straight out of George Orwell’s 1984, with a nod to Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron ... The writing is wonderful, but the novel begins to fall apart—not because of the writing, but because of lingering questions that are not addressed. I found myself looking up from the pages and out the window ... There are many promising ideas that never really come to anything ... Or perhaps it’s simply a fine book wandering through territory that’s been explored by others who discovered more.
Imagery takes a back seat to intellectual discourse. While readers receive a clear picture of the university campus where Adriane, now dubbed 'Mary Ellen,' resides, showy descriptions are limited. In their place are professors' lectures along with Adriane's bewilderment and ever-growing skepticism over her new home.What starts as a familiar dystopian story line morphs into a tale so perplexing one shouldn't read this book alone. Cerebral book clubs, clear your calendars.
The dystopia itself is pretty standard, with the exceptional aspects I cited above. The backstory does not really chart how we got there, or how any dystopia a writer might envision after seventy years of post-Orwell events would and must differ from 1984. If you take a book like Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway or Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan as hip postmodern dystopias, then Oates’s version seems relatively flat... So on this level, the book offers nothing radically new.
While in this clever, brain-twisting, Poe-like fable she looks to the past and the future to dramatize the vulnerability of the psyche, the fragility of freedom, and the catastrophic consequences of repressing intelligence, independence, and creativity, what Oates illuminates is the present ... Oates is always provocative, but this tensile dystopian tale will magnetize readers in a whole new mode.
Oates dwells much, sometimes ponderously so, on B.F. Skinner’s then-popular concept of behaviorism, which slotted humans as dim machines lacking in free will. And Oates’ late style, thick with em dashes and exclamatory prose, flirts with melodrama. But forgivably so: Are we not living in emotionally demanding times? More shambling than dystopian classics by Orwell, Atwood, and Ishiguro but energized by a similar spirit of outrage.
Oates’s eerie dystopian novel ... weaves a feeling of constant menace and paranoia throughout as Adriane struggles to remember her old life and adjust to her new one. The conclusion is surprising and ambiguous, leaving readers to question their own perception of events, making for a memorable novel.
