The Time Traveler’s Wife

Love stories transcend time. Some of them do it very badly, with a cliché story and predictable dialogue. Some of them do it comfortably, with characters we can recognize from our own lives and “what if” adventures we can live vicariously. The Time Traveler’s Wife does it with a new kind of love that takes me along the entire spectrum of human love.  The catharsis of this novel is much like the movie Beaches, or the classic Where the Red Fern Grows, since the tenderness and love of true friendship can swing all the way to true despair and allow me to wallow in the misery of love without losing sight of the reasons for loving in the first place.

Love is one of the few things that can transport the human mind away from the madness and routine of daily life- the things we have to struggle or wade through in order for time to pass- into a higher, spiritual perspective that can make something more of our lives. When you take love out of the time constraints, the bitterness and sweetness remain in balance. There are just as many tears in a good love story as there are ecstatic kisses and virginal dreams.

No true storyline is ever as clean in life as it is in a novel. There are no loose ends of friends lost and never found, no misdirected fears- they have been culled from the story in order to trim the distractions away from what is important. I envy this compartmentalism. If I could put everything else on a backburner and deal with one issue at a time, perhaps I’d have a chance at thinking clearly again someday.

Clare Abshire has the cliff’s notes to her own life. She has her love determined for her, predicted for her, and placed on a silver platter (or a field in her backyard). She is a passive force in her own life, swept along by the genetic mutation of her true love into a relationship in which she had no real choice. On the other hand, Henry is thrown at Clare in an almost visceral fashion, as well when she finds him after loving him for years. It underlines the big flaw in determinism, for me. If there is a “hand of fate”, we are completely in its grip. Clare never had a chance against a love that, by way of a genetic mutation in her future husband, was dropped in her lap and taken away again by fate. Henry was a pawn in a great genetic game, predetermined down to a genetic level.

How Calvinist.