The Time Traveller's Wife ~ Not so complimentary review

84 of 116 people found the following review helpful:

HOW CAN ANYONE LIKE THIS PRETENTIOUS SELF-SATISFIED DRIVEL?
, January 13, 2004
By
Marc A. Weiner (Bloomington, IN USA) - See all my reviews


This review is from: The Time Traveler's Wife (Today Show Book Club #15) (Hardcover)

Why is this book so popular? Is it the plot-premise of a romantic relationship between a man who uncontrollably travels through time-leaving and returning to the present without warning-and the more chronologically anchored woman who loves him, or is it perhaps something else entirely? I was lulled into buying this book by the many enthusiastic reviews it has received, but found it to be not only a waste of time, but annoying as well. This must be one of the most pretentious novels I've ever read. All of the characters act and sound like refugees from an episode of Friends or Seinfeld, a group of oh-so-cool, oh-so-well-educated, exquisitely cultured, insouciant and--wow, really neat!--yuppies in their mid-thirties who all speak with the same voice, quote an endless string of Rilke poems, make references to Foucault and Heidegger, name-drop and cite passages from their favorite belletristic authors, listen to everything under the sun from the trendiest, coolest punk music to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, eat in the newest ethnic restaurants (Thai seems to be a special favorite), and exhibit inexhaustible sexual energy while igniting overwhelming desire in all those around them. The novel reads like a compilation of cultural clichés, from the title character's experiences while traveling through time (like the human in the first Terminator movie, he arrives nauseous, naked, and exhibits sprinter-like athleticism), to countless other scenes in each of which the author has him cite some literary quote obviously intended to make him appear exquisitely educated (one particularly egregious examples is one scene in which he quotes--get ready to be impressed-Hamlet's "Had I but world enough and time.").
Though certainly unintended, the book strikes one as a satirical postmodernist version of Love Story, albeit with a twist: this time it's the girl whose family is incredibly wealthy (of course they live in a Frank Lloyd Wright-like mansion), while the guy's parents are less well-to-do, but also uniquely impressive: the author's imagination would not allow her main character's deceased mother to be just any old Hausfrau-no, she had to be a young, beautiful, Metropolitan Opera diva, and his bereaved father not just some normal, nine-to-five type of guy, but no less than the principal violinist of the New York Philharmonic. Everyone in this group of shallow, narcissistic intellectual wannabes speaks with the same voice and thinks with the same, impoverished, cliché-ridden imagination, and each thereby emerges as little more than a two-dimensional player in a larger, stereotypical ensemble design (and hence, again, as a fictional distant cousin of the casts of TV sit-coms); we have the rugged, iconoclastic young man (a heart-throb and heart-breaker of countless unfortunate women-sound like Ted Danson to anyone?), the middle-class princess (an object of desire for all who see her, men and women alike-perhaps they can cast Jennifer Aniston in the role if this is ever made into a movie), their male best friend who, though married, also lusts after Clare, his flip and savvy wife, their gay acquaintance who, of course, is dying of AIDS (Robert Downey, Jr., could play this guy), etc. etc.
While the manifest content of this self-satisfied text appears to descend from the liberalism of the late 1960s, its implied conservative ideology is located in the traditional image of the nuclear family, the sanctity of which is repeated over and over again in the book and is central to such other (and in this respect similar, though cinematic) examples of popular culture of the last twenty years as Woody Allen's Hannah and her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors, Fatal Attraction, and virtually all of Spielberg's most popular films. Perhaps that is the key to this shallow novel's success: It manages to appeal to the pseudo-intellectual tastes of an aging and despairing generation of liberals even as it reinforces the foundations of a society that no longer dares hope for political change, and instead has retreated into the more modest sphere of domestic bliss. I don't know what is scarier: the fact that this book is so completely lacking in any ironic awareness of its own pretentious make-up, that it has been received with such praise, or that, as the publishers proudly inform us, this is the author's first novel. Perhaps it's a good thing that time-travel remains an element of fiction.