Henry and Clare's enduring love is at the center of Audrey Niffenegger's haunting novel, The Time Traveler's Wife ... But Niffenegger, despite her moving, razor-edged prose, doesn't claim to be a romantic. She writes with the unflinching yet detached clarity of a war correspondent standing at the sidelines of an unfolding battle. She possesses a historian's eye for contextual detail ... The ability to revisit one's past doesn't necessarily illuminate one's understanding of events. And knowing the future is not particularly a good thing, Niffenegger's story implies. This is what makes her story both compelling and unsettling.
Audrey Niffenegger's debut novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, at turns playful, wearisome, and moving, chronicles the efforts of Henry, a librarian, and Clare, an artist, to build a stable life together despite the unending threat of separation and loss ... the characters' accounts of the normal rites of passage — dating, friendships, family visits, engagement, planning their wedding — is like flipping through a photo album; the activities recounted are not remarkable, but we feel privy to someone's intimate, precious memories ... At its most touching, the novel is a hymn to the pleasures of the ordinary and tangible, the sensuousness of the here and now ... The Time Traveler's Wife can be an exasperating read, but as a love story it has its appeal.
Audrey Niffenegger throws you into a pretty perplexing scenario at the start of The Time Traveler's Wife...[Henry] has been travelling from his future to [Clare's] past, and in that past they fell in love, so he hasn't yet met her in his own present ... Somehow, that tangled mess of tenses sorts out on the page into a scene that is entirely comprehensible and rather charming ... Niffenegger goes on to exploit the possibilities of her fantasy scenario with immense skill ... Take away the time travel, and you have a writer reminiscent of Anne Tyler and Carol Shields, who captures the rhythms of intimacy, who burrows into the particularities of family life. Because she builds this scaffolding of domesticity, what you remember is the realism as well as the fantasy, and through much of the book the time travel works to enhance the reality rather than take over from it ... she certainly weaves her plot well.
But this is not a novel about time travel...Time travel is the quandary, the problem, the joy and the sorrow of the book, but the meat of the story is the love between Henry and Clare ... they temper the love story and test the truth of the dyad the composes the heart of the story. The darkest moments in the character's lives are where we most find them clinging to one another rather than being blown apart ... But what better testament to good writing is there than the ability to make characters so developed and true that even their imagined slights move us to tears?
Niffenegger has written a soaring love story illuminated by dozens of finely observed details and scenes, and one that skates nimbly around a huge conundrum at the heart of the book ... such is the author's tenderness with the characters, and the determinedly ungimmicky way in which she writes of their predicament...that the book is much more love story than fantasy ... there's no Disney cuteness here. Henry's foreordained end is agonizing, but Niffenegger has another card up her sleeve, and plays it with poignant grace ... leaves a reader with an impression of life's riches and strangeness rather than of easy thrills.
Mainstreamed time-travel romance, cleverly executed and tastefully furnished if occasionally overwrought: a first from fine newcomer Niffenegger...While the many iterations and loops here are intricately woven, the plot, proper, is fairly simple ... Presented as a literary novel, this is more accurately an exceedingly literate one, distinguished by the nearly constant background thrum of connoisseurship ... A Love Story for educated, upper-middle-class tastes.
