Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

The trouble began long before June 9, 1976, when I became aware of it, but June 9 is the day I remember.  It was my twenty-sixth birthday.  It was also the day I met Rufus--the day he called me to him for the first time.

Dana Franklin passes out in 1976 and wakes up in early 19th century Maryland, just in time to save a young boy from drowning.  The episode lasts for maybe fifteen minutes, but when she returns, only a few seconds have passed.  When she's "called" again, it's 1819, and the boy is a little older, and about to accidentally burn his house down.  This time, Dana stays a little longer--and discovers, at the point of a gun, that she only returns to her own time when her life is in jeopardy.

Of course, death isn't the only frightening prospect for a black woman in the antebellum South.  Each time Dana is called to help Rufus--a man whom, she discovers, is her distant ancestor--she finds herself deep in Plantation life, not a slave exactly, not that those sort of technicalities matter.  Even when she manages to bring her husband, Kevin, along with her, they must disguise their marriage--Kevin is white--and pose as master and slave.  Each time she faces the possibility that she'll never return.

Kindred is a better thought experiment than a novel.  It has a very cinematic sense of plot--in fact, I'm surprised no one's tried to make a film out of it yet.  The nature of Dana's time traveling means that every chapter has to end with a cliffhanger.  The stakes are kept constantly high--when Kevin fails to reach Dana before she "disappears" back to the modern day, he is essentially trapped until Rufus calls her back, and spends five lonely years stuck in the 19th century.  Yet it seems to me Dana never coheres as a character rather than an archetype, Kevin, less so.  Furthermore, the novel's use of history often seems flatly encyclopedic.

The best thing about the novel is the relationship between Dana and her ancestor, Rufus.  Dana is cast into the role of protector for Rufus, and she saves him from certain death multiple times, but she's unable to help him grow into someone who leads a life contrary to his family and his society.  As a result, Rufus is alternately cruel and needy towards Dana--he can not live without her, but he doesn't have access to the kind of respect and gratitude that need requires.  He gives her gifts, then has her whipped, pleads with her not to leave him, then backs his pleas up at the point of a rifle.  Their relationship mirrors that between Rufus and Alice, the slave who will give birth to Dana's family line.  In the 20th century, Butler suggests, Rufus might have been able to pursue Alice romantically in the way that Kevin pursues Dana; in the antebellum South Alice's child will inevitably be a product of rape.

Butler does a good job, without excusing Rufus' cruelties, of showing the way in which he himself is limited and malformed by the "peculiar institution."  (Spoiler alert!)  When Dana is called for the last time, it is because Alice has hanged herself.  Rufus, distraught, turns his sexual advances on Dana, and though she has never confessed their kinship, the possibility of incest underlines the destructiveness of slavery on family relationships, a destructiveness which necessitates that Dana kill the man who she has toiled against her will to protect.

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Why The Time Traveler's Wife? Why not The Time Traveler? Or better yet, why not The Time Traveler and His Wife? After all, it's the dashing librarian and accidental time traveler Henry who is the real focus of this novel, not his perpetually abandoned wife, Clare, or at the very least they should share top billing. Is the author, Audrey Niffenegger, trying to emphasize Clare's experience as the Other in this novel, the one left behind, the one who has to deal with the constant abandonment and frustration? That perhaps would have made a more interesting novel. Such are the things that perplexed me about The Time Traveler's Wife.

My friend Rachel Bethany bought this book for me at the Strand, hoping that I would love it as much as she did; I'm sad to say that I didn't much care for it. But, in deference, let's start with what the book does well: It's amazingly well-plotted. The plot centers around Henry DeTamble, who has the unique ability to travel through time, but not the ability to control when he goes or to when. As a result, he is constantly appearing in strange places and times, stark naked. He is married--at some point--to Clare Abshire, a beautiful redhead who is--or will become--an artist. But the nature of their relationship is unusual; she meets him for the first time when she is a child and he appears in the meadow outside her family's home, thirty years old and nude. He meets her for the first time when they are the same age; she jumps for joy because she has been waiting for years to meet him in her own timeline, and yet he has no idea who she is.

There's a sort of fascinating circuity here: Clearly Henry and Clare are meant to be together, but what is the force that drives them together? He appears that first day in the meadow because has a deep connection to Clare, but without that first appearance--and those thereafter--that connection would never have been formed. It's an interesting question that Niffenegger does disappointingly little to develop.

Yet, everything has been thought ought with the utmost care and precision; the overlapping timelines must have taken an extraordinary effort to map out. Nothing seems to be out of place; the novel is refreshingly clear of the little nonsense paradoxes that seem to creep into bad science fiction. Even more impressively, Niffenegger finds a way to arrange these time traveling episodes so that they have some semblance of true chronology, and yet still manages to ratchet the tension up considerably in the novel's closing chapters.

Now for the bad: I could not have cared any less about what happened to these characters, who were absolutely obnoxious. Niffenegger tries to impose some sort of troubled past on Henry through his mother's death in a car accident and his father's ensuing alcoholism, but Henry hardly seems to have any character flaws for it. He is an accomplished fighter and thief, but develops these traits only as a necessity due to his time traveling; otherwise he's just a dashing librarian. Clare is worse, little more than a cipher, with the personality of a sock.

Niffenegger substitutes taste for character. Over the 500+ pages of the novel, we're told what kind of music the characters listen to, what kind of art they enjoy, and what kind of fucking dinner they eat. Everything is so tasteful and cultured, it's hard to shake the impression that Niffenegger is, in some sense, projecting her own awesome tastes onto her characters, begging that we be impressed. Even when Henry and Clare differ, it's obnoxious:

How can Clare listen to Cheap Trick? Why does she like the Eagles? I'll never know, because she gets all defensive when I ask her. How can it be that the woman I love doesn't want to listen to Musique du Garrot et de la Farraille?

Barf. Here's another scene where we open on Clare:

I'm sitting by myself at a tiny table in the front window of Cafe Pregolisi, a venerable little rat hole with excellent coffee. I'm supposed to be working on a paper on Alice in Wonderland for the History of the Grotesque class I'm taking this summer; instead I'm daydreaming, staring idly at the natives, who are bustling and hustling in the early evening of Halsted Street.

Double barf. Henry and Clare teach a lesson to a couple "baby punks":

Henry sits down at the kitchen table, and Bobby sits down across from him. "Okay," says Henry. "You have to go back to the sixties, right? You start with the Velvet Underground, in New York. And then, right over here in Detroit, you've got the MC5, and Iggy Pop and the Stooges. And then back in New York, there were the New York Dolls, and the Heartbreakers--"

"Tom Petty?" says Jodie. "We've heard of him."

"Um, no, this was a totally different band," says Henry. "Most of them died in the eighties."

"Plane crash?" asks Bobby.

"Heroin," Henry corrects. "Anyway, there was Television, and Richard Hell and the Voidods, and Patti Smith."

"Talking Heads," I add.

"Huh. I dunno. Would you really consider them punk?"

A plane crash? Seriously, Bobby? Here are Henry and Clare at dinner:

Kimy gets up and clears our salad plates and brings in a bowl of green beans and a steaming plate of "Roast Duck with Raspberry Pink Peppercorn Sauce." It's heavenly. I realize where Henry learned to cook. "What do you think?" Kimy demands. "It's delicious, Kimy," says Mr. DeTamble, and I echo his praise. "Maybe cut down on the sugar?" Henry asks. "Yeah, I think so, too," says Kimy. "It's really tender though," Henry says, and Kimy grins.

It goes on like this, inanely. After 500 pages, I knew what magazines Henry reads, and what concerts Clare goes to, and what they like to eat for dessert, and I knew that Clare's family lives in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Why Frank Lloyd Wright? Why not?

In her review, Amanda complained that the novel is bogged down by unnecessarily pornographic material:

They just bother me when they aren't needed for the story to move forward, when they're in there for shock value. It feels completely unrealistic, for instance, for a new mother to lay on her bed, sigh, and say, "My cunt hurts." Who really says that? No one I've ever met, at least.

Usually I'm unsympathetic to complaints that a novel is too graphic, but I think Amanda has it exactly right, or at least part of it exactly right: Somewhere in here is a 200-page novel filled out with nonsense. These scenes aren't just unnecessarily graphic, they're unnecessary. Why does Niffenegger devote ten pages to Clare and Henry discuss how much more sex they have than other couples, and how great it is? To make the rest of us feel bad? Or just to make us think, hey, these two, they're cool, I wish I could be like them. Niffenegger certainly seems to want to.

And the tragedy is that, somewhere between Richard Hell and the Roast Duck with the Pink Peppercorn Sauce, is a story with tremendous symbolic power that speaks to the nature of fate, of time, and of love. I think that maybe if Niffenegger had spent more time thinking about those things, and less about how to convince us Henry and Clare are awesome, it might have been an infinitely better book.

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Why is love intensified by absence? Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry.

This is easily the best book I’ve read this year, and probably the most moving book I’ve ever read. I couldn’t put it down. It was great.

Henry, the time traveler of the title, has a genetic disorder that causes him to travel through time, mostly his own past, without warning. His episodes can be triggered by stress, illness, surprise, or even standing up too quickly. He finds himself whenever and wherever, completely naked, often vomiting, and occasionally surrounded by very confused strangers. Some of the most interesting parts of the novel were when Henry had to cope with being dropped in different situations that were completely out of his control, often having to seek help from his past or future self. Clare is Henry’s wife, in some, but not all, layers of time that the story follows. The story is almost evenly divided between her narration and Henry’s. She plays Penelope to Henry’s Odysseus, and a lot of her plot is figuring out how to cope with this strange part of their relationship, but she does it gracefully. "Love conquers all," or so I've heard.

As you can probably imagine, a lot of Niffenegger’s plot is very circular. Henry grows up, meets Clare, marries her, then travels back into the past and meets her as a six year-old girl. Clare grows up, recognizes Henry in a library, and asks him out. This is the first time Henry meets Clare. There are all kinds of situations like this one: one of them has almost always experienced the majority of their relationship before the other, past and future. Often times, something very important to their life and the story happens only as a result of Henry accidentally (or intentionally) affecting their past or future. But, and here’s the only place where the book teeters on the frontier of science-fiction land, everything that’s ever happened, or will happen, or is happening, is unchangeable, and on the same plane. Time is viewed as something very parallel. The whole novel is written in the present tense to emphasize this, which I liked very much. You might expect a plot that constantly jumps backwards or forwards in time any number of years or days to be a headache, as I did, but Niffenegger handled it perfectly, and managed to completely avoid any redundancy that probably could have sprung up very easily.

The most beautiful thing about this book is the joy or pain that they share (or that Henry keeps from Clare) at knowing certain inevitable parts of their future, good or bad. The Time Traveler’s Wife raises a lot of questions about how much of our lives are actually in our own hands, and I don’t mind that it doesn’t bother to answer them, or speculate as to whose hands they might be in. That’s not the point. The point is that they fell in love, and they couldn’t help it, and nothing can change it. It’s completely new to see love overcome something like a genetic time travel disorder, but it still feels familiar. Anyone who’s ever fallen in love, or cared deeply for anyone, will be able to understand a lot of what Henry and Clare go through, even if they don’t have a genetic disorder that causes them to instantaneously travel through time and space, completely naked.

Niffenegger, although she has a silly name, wrote a great novel. And I don’t care what you think about love stories; this is a great story no matter what you call it. Read it.