I run a reading workshop which begins with a little shelf assessment. Participants bring a stack of books that have shaped who they are: childhood treasures; new revelations; comfort reads. Books they once cherished but have now outgrown. The usual suspect in that category is Audrey Niffenegger’s 2003 novel The Time Traveler’s Wife. Once smitten, readers now find that time-warped romance cruel. What felt like destiny now feels like a cage. As they explain, I’m always struck by the same thought: Wasn’t it always cruel? Wasn’t that the point?
Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire are a couple caught in a causal loop. The irresolvable question is where that loop starts: does a bright young art student fall in love with a junior librarian, or does a time-travelling man groom a child to become his future wife? If the answer is both – and it has to be – what are we to make of their marriage? Can you truly choose someone if you believe the choice is already made?
In the last two decades, The Time Traveler’s Wife has been adapted for Hollywood and HBO and sold more than 9m copies in 40 languages. Readers are still arguing about free will and fate. We may have grown queasier about the bind Clare and Henry are in, but Niffenegger’s novel was never hiding its dark heart. Just look at the original cover: a little girl guarding a pair of men’s shoes. She’s in knee-high socks and Mary Janes, her hands by her sides like a tiny soldier. What is she waiting for? A future or a trap? Is there a difference?
There’s now a sequel: Life Out of Order. Will Niffenegger conjure the same unease? To cut a 560-page story short, no. There’s plenty of unease here – political, ecological, technological – but none of it gets under the skin (the ick-factor of The Time Traveler’s Wife is treated like an in-joke). We’re in dystopia territory. Again. And it’s hard to get excited about more literary ruin.
For all its temporal complexity, the emotional logic of The Time Traveler’s Wife was simple: for better and worse, it was a love story. The book was a kite with a strong string. The sequel cuts that string. Life Out of Order is at the mercy of every small gust of an idea, and there are decades’ worth of them blowing about in here.
Just setting out the cast feels like pinning a murder board: Henry is now dead, though he still pops in from the past, and Clare has raised their daughter, Alba, alone. Alba has inherited her father’s time-travel gene, but has more control. Unbound by the conventions of clock time, Alba is married to Zach in the present, Oliver in the past, and both of them in the future. Oliver is a fellow time-traveller seeking refuge in the past (the future is sticky); Zach is mostly harmless and thinks Oliver is his drinking buddy. Clare is now married to Beck, who makes herself scarce when Henry visits from beyond the grave. Beck is the mother of Isadora, a “menace” of a child who spends her days locked in a basement, for spoilery reasons. Isadora is catalytic – everyone can feel it. Will she bring havoc or salvation? Probably both. Whatever happens, it will involve Alba’s violin and a mouldering yellow house in the outer suburbs of Chicago.
There are half a dozen ways – at least – to describe Life Out of Order: as ethical non-monogamy meets the space-time continuum; a study of grief and its manifestations; a cautionary tale about teaching machines to dream; a grim vision of a coming America; a hymn to music and all the ways it salves and saves us; and a fatalist eco-dystopia: what it means to fight for a planet that is assuredly doomed.
Niffenegger starts some of these stories, and finishes others. Major characters disappear for hundreds of pages; hundreds of years are leapt in a paragraph or two. We seem to be in a counter-historical version of the US, which mightexplain why everyone from the previous book is acting so strangely. Most of the cast have been recruited by Antifa, until that plotline evaporates. What also vanishes is the genetic science of time travel: “Chrono-displacement”. At the end of The Time Traveler’s Wife, that discovery seemed poised to reshape the world (imagine what it would do to financial markets alone). Here, it’s dispatched with a shrug: “I never hear about time travel anymore,” Zach muses. “There was that big announcement, and then it just – died.”
In the end, it’s almost impossible to say whose story this is. Alba is the most likely candidate, but also the least interesting. Where her father grappled with the ethics of time travel – those lurking causal cruelties – Alba mostly does what she does because she’s already done it. Why bother to fret or regret when predestination does the moral work for you? She slips in and out of the plot dropping nuggets of portent, juggling husbands, and fiddling (literally) while the world burns. It feels callous rather than cruel: cold-blooded.
That’s the big difference here: heat – something a little more carnal than planetary warming. There was ferocity in Henry and Clare’s love, a hunger that twisted their causal loop into a knot. They adored one another, even though their adoration was selfish; each loved the person they helped to make. Because isn’t that what we all do, in our own quiet and needful ways: create the people we love?
Life Out of Order is bereft of hunger. What we have in its place is exhaustion. Who has time for the body when the body politic is rotten? When the very notion of embodiment may be obsolete? Alba is not waiting for a pair of shoes to be filled, she’s waiting for the end of the world. “I have loved time travel and have wished to be done with it,” she tells us on the opening page of Life Out of Order. That feels like the prophecy here.
