Anyway, in this episode, I will review The Time Traveler's Wife, as well as Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton; since both are relatively recent books, and then I can get on to the more classic stuff, before having a nice clean slate for The Master and Margarita and Anne Sexton. We cool? On with the show:
These books seem well worth the comparing: both were written in the past couple years, both are written by a woman and is the author's first novel, both have similar overriding themes: family history, memory, pregnancy, first person narratives. After that point, though, the stories diverge:
I think that I was possibly pre-disposed to like The Monsters of Templeton: much like an ongoing project of mine, it is mainly about a re-imagining of American history, an odd combination of myth and literature and fact and scandal. One morning, after being run out on a rail by her archeology professor's wife due to a disaterous affair, Willie Upton arrives back at her childhood home of Templeton. That same morning, the body of a white, strage monster surfaces in the lake beside the small, upstate town. Not too long after that, Willie's mother tells her that her father is not one of the four San Francisco hippies Vi claimed it to be, but someone who Willie has known her whole life: a man from Templeton, who's family is as old as the Uptons'.These are the events that kick off the book; and those that connect the various perspectives that Groff introduces through the story. As Willie explores her family's past, trying to catch the missing link that leads to her father, she learns more than she possibly wanted to, about the lives her ancestors led and the skeletons in their closets. Soon, her family - once beloved for being the descendants of the man who founded Templeton - are just as monsterous as the title suggests, and Willie's history is muddled with betrayal, bastard children, murder, rape, and James Fennimore Cooper characters. This can get grating at times; but Groff keeps it interesting by skipping between historical records (which Willie knows) and narratives (which Willie is no aware of) of all the persons that are investigated, as well as portraits of the various Templetons and an ever-expanding family tree.
Willie herself is a decent enough narrator; and thankfully I really start to like her towards the end of the novel. I should note here that I have never really liked first person narrators, they seem to talk too much, and Willie is certainly the endless-tangent type, and her anecdotes that go back to her relationship with a sickly best friend are some of the weakest parts of the narration. Honestly, will there ever be an end to "I have to deal with a loved one who is sick!"?
What I really loved about the book was the creativity that Groff exudes; even if she is not completely engaging with her narrative style, the way in which the mystery unfolds and the plot twist that reveals Willie's paternal side is, towards the end, exciting. And the monster! The monster, a potent symbol and one of the most believable science-fiction elements that I've read lately, might just have been my favorite part; "Glimmey" is more or less a giant seal who only needs to surface every few dozen years, a powerful symbol of the everlasting mystery and wonder that so many people associate with their homes; and when it is found to be real and dead, the town is enveloped in sadness and despair for their lost myths. This is repeated in the loss of Willie's idyllic understanding of her ancestors, and in the many falsehoods in the relationship she has with her professor, as well as with the baby she bears with her into Templeton.
But, instead of choosing to tear down fantasy to erect truth, Groff chooses to keep the myth and magic of Willie and Templeton's history alive within the truth that she reveals, and the result is uplifting, without feeling too schmaltzy. True, there were a lot of sections in the novel that dragged on far too much, and there are some characters who seem strange or superfluous in the modern parts of the story, but as a summer read it's great, and as an academic read it satisfies.
Likewise, I feel that I was pre-disposed to dislike The Time Traveler's Wife, if for no other reason than I really, really can't stand most star-crossed lover stories. In these instances, love seems too easy, there's no struggle in it, the only strain on the relationship seems external; whatever it is in the world that dares to tear the two lovers apart, but it most likely won't, since true love will always win, at least until someone dies. In the case of Audrey Niffenegger's novel, the Thing That Will Tear Us Apart is, as the title suggests, time travel.Henry DeTamble, a stupidly handsome, dreamy, sexy, smart, bookishly intelligent, Rilke-loving multilingual son of a famous violinist and a famous opera singer who describes himself as an "Egon Schiele look-alike", is cursed with a genetic disorder that causes him to time-travel inadvertently. Where he goes, when he goes, why he goes, how long he is there, and when he comes back are random factors; the only thing that is constant is that Henry travels to moments and places familiar to him, and that when he shows up he's naked, completely exposed to the elements. He gets used to this, learning how to fend for himself, and tends to sedate himself with a hard and fast lifestyle of sex, drugs, and alcohol, all the while keeping a perfectly respectable job as a librarian in the Newberry Library in Chicago. Right.
One afternoon, Henry is confronted by Clare, a stupidly gorgeous, artsy, music-loving, creative woman with red red red silky silky hair, who tells her that he has known her all her life, and thus they are in love. The rest of the tale focuses partly on Henry's sojourns into his and Clare's past and future, and mostly on how deeply they love each other, which is to say, really fucking deeply. No lie. Oh, and punk rock, because Henry loves punk rock (but he hates Joni Mitchell? Really? Like 'yell at my wife' kind of hate? But he loves opera?)
Niffenegger is familiar to me through her illustrated stories The Three Incestuous Sisters and The Adventurers, which each have a creative, dreamlike, mystical feel to them, so I expected something similar with The Time Traveler's Wife: a close-to-the chest, bare and poignant story about the things that we do not understand, of love and destiny. In many ways, you can read the potential for that in the novel, but there are so many short steps that Niffenegger takes that, honestly, I didn't expect, and the moments of cataloguing that either narrator uses seem not so much nuances of character, but instead seem to be covering up for the author's lack of a deep and luscious mood that the story seems to deserve: it's like she talks too much when she should say nothing, and stays silent when there's so much that she could do about it.
The characters who are not Henry and Clare are barely developed stock personas (there's even a Mammy-like cook and a Korean housekeeper, both of them speaking in almost insulting dialects ("Ooh, boy, you been eatin' your Wheaties!" and "Hey, you guys got baby now?", respectively)), and Henry and Clare themselves seem to have very little about their personalities to be interesting. They both suffer from Cool by Association; their lives are described by their taste in food, music, film, clothing, home design, modern art, political theory. Furthermore, the Time Traveling problem that Henry has seems to actually cause him little lasting harm until a point near the end: he is always able to find clothes, he is only gone for a few days at the most, and if someone is astounded by Henry's disappearances, he easily explains it to them. He would make a shitty superhero (there's even a Superman/Clark Kent reference in the book, too!).
Clare, despite being what we can assume is supposed to be a model for the perfect young independent woman, lives her life almost dependently on Henry: she saves herself for him while he fucks half the women in Chicago, she is never enraged by his disappearance or by his former behavior, she puts her art aside or picks it up only if he is there to enable her. In short, she is very much what most Harlequin heroines boil down to, sitting and pining her life away, waiting for the one man she can only love. Even when Henry insists that she live her life to the fullest and enjoy it even if he isn't there, she presumably goes nowhere, does nothing, and waits. For fifty years. There are some soaring moments in the book, though: the relationship that Henry has with his mother's death, as well as the future one that he has with his daughter, are sweet and subtley beautiful, and Henry's trips into his own past are the most revealing of them all.
What irks me, I suppose, is that here Niffenegger is introducing a somewhat brilliant concept, and instead of taking it in a direction that would make it a better, possibly wonderful book, she seems to be settling: there are no long-term consequences for anything for four out of the book's five hundred pages, there is never a moment where either Henry or Clare question themselves or each other to the point of destroying their relationship; they simply accept that they are in love, and stay that way. The best love stories are the ones where people learn to fall in love, those that take the time to explain what it is in each character's personality that makes them inevitably drawn to their soulmate. In this story, Clare arrives and tells Henry that he loves her, but only because, when she was a girl, Henry time-traveled to her to tell her the same thing. And though this does make for a good discussion of fate, the persons involved are so flat, and there are so many irritating things about them that are never confronted or resolved, that I didn't really care to see that happen.
The Monsters of Templeton actually lacked any sort of coherent love story or background; most of the relationships involved within the plot seem to be loveless and, in some cases, spiteful. And though I am coming off of that tirade against The Time Traveler's Wife, that does not mean that I am not a romantic. Trust me, I'm more than willing to play the whole "we were meant to be! I cannot live without you!" song until the record's thin, but that's not the story of my life. I have aspirations of my own, and I want to make sure that I live my own life as my own person, even if I'm in the most perfectly loving relationship. But if that perfect balance were to be the equivalent of, say, tea with just a spoonful of sugar, then The Monsters of Templeton is bitter (but with a little lemon, maybe), and The Time Traveler's Wife is very much tea-flavored syrup. Though I was told over and over again that they were in love, I came to realize that Henry and Clare really weren't that stirring. With Willie and her repetoire of Templetonians, I learned very little of love or personal feelings, but at least they were damned interesting.
I'm not employing any sort of rating system into my reviews, I think it would be unfair, besides, I'm not the best expert on whether a book is good or not, just how much I do or don't like it. That being said, here's what I can tell you: if you want a good summer read that's not too long and not too dumb and not way too deep and yet still smart, hit up The Monsters of Templeton. If you're a romantic who just wants a sappy love story that is, at times, the equivalent of a Harlequin Romance novel for the intellectual Elite, then pick up The Time Traveler's Wife, especially since the movie is set to open in August, with Eric Bana, Rachel McAdams, and the guy from Office Space as Gomez, who is the most unexplainably dickish person ever to be the BFF character. Anyway, get those nose in them books!
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