What I'm Reading: The Time Traveler's Wife

I just re-read this last week for my book club (aka – eat, drink wine, talk books for 30 minutes and gossip for 90 minutes club). It had been a few years since I’d picked it up, and I remembered love, love, loving it the first time around. It was a perfect mix for me – I’m something of a sci-fi/fantasy nerd, and time travel books and movies are like my favorite EVER, plus it had the emotion of a well-done chick lit book. I was immediately sold.


This time around, I still loved it. Not everyone in my book club did, however. A few ladies flat-out hated it, in fact. As I listened to their reasons, I tried to refute them in my head – I wasn’t going to try to get them to change their opinions, but I was curious how my rationale held up against some common criticisms:

-Too confusing . Well … umm … sorry. I don’t think any of my book club friends are idiots or anything, but I think maybe they just weren’t paying that much attention. There were very few instances in this book where I felt ‘lost’. For long, anyway. Sure, sometimes you have to go a few pages to remind yourself of what year the characters are in and how old they are, but this wasn’t really too cumbersome for me.

-Too gross. Some people were really disturbed by the concepts of Henry getting sexy with himself, Henry having sex with Claire while ‘another Henry’ lay there sleeping, and of Claire miscarrying her babies outside of her body. Any they were right … these concepts were disturbing. But the weirdness of these scenes were far overshadowed for me by the overwhelming cleverness of it all – regarding the babies, especially. It was disturbing, obviously. But I was really impressed with the thought Niffenegger put into this concept – it made total sense, but wasn’t immediately obvious. If Henry’s disease is genetic, and he can’t control his time travelling, it follows that his children would suffer the same fate. Basically, yeah – it was gross. But it wasn’t just an unnecessary plot device.

-The language. Here’s the one I can get on board with. I’ve never uttered the c-u-next-Tuesday word as far as I know, but it doesn’t really bother me on a fundamental level. I’m not a prude, I guess is what I’m saying. HOWEVER, an upper-crust 21-year old woman doesn’t refer to her vajay-jay that way. She just doesn’t. When Henry said it, maybe I could buy it. Maybe. But it just felt forced, along with some of the obscure punk references, etc. that the author peppered the book with.

But really, I don’t care. This story fascinates me and makes me bawl near the end every damn time. I still highly recommend it. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but plan to when it comes out on DVD next week … it’ll be interesting to see how my girlfriend Rachel McAdams performs.