No, not like Billy Pilgrim. This is different. Henry has some kind of disease where his entire body and soul suddenly gets transported to a different time. He'll be sitting there drinking coffee with you, suddenly complain that he will feel nauseous, and POOF! he's gone. Only his body goes. Anything foreign (clothes, shoes, fillings, contacts, glasses) gets left behind. So you are sitting there drinking coffee with a pile of clothes.
If you are Clare de Tamble, you may merely shrug. This is something your used to. Henry has been a part of your life since you were 6, when you met Henry for the first time in a clearing. As he kept traveling back in time, you fell in love. Then you met Henry in the present where he works in Chicago in some high-falutin laboratory, and you got married. It was weird -- you knew him very well, but the Henry you met in the present did not know who you were. The Henry you have met before is a little older, a little wiser, a little less of a douche.
Where did Henry go? More likely than not in the past, and more likely than not to a place near his own past. He tends to stick to his own continuum. He revisits traumatic events in his past quite often. Very rarely does he go into the future.
Can he control it? No. It happens, and he's gone. He has no say as to where he goes. He does not know how long he'll be gone. He winds up naked and with nothing in whatever place he ends up, and he steals what he needs to survive. Henry has some kind of disease, you see, that allows him to time travel...
When will he back? Who knows. Could be a few minutes, hours, days. One thing is for sure...time seems to elapse slower in the present. If he is gone for spends a few hours in the past it will be minutes in the present. Days are like weeks.
What is it like to live with a guy who keeps disappearing all the time? It's hard. It's been hard to have a child (but after two dreadful miscarriages you finally had one, and she is afflicted with the same....affliction. damn.). Plus, Henry knows how and when he will die. And when it happens...wow. It's sad.
So its a sad book. Kind of about living with dignity against our own finiteness. That seems to be how Henry grows. When we meet him, as I said, he's a real douche. He sleeps around, he has stupid 90's hair, he's kind of an asshole. Being with Clare kind of helps him lose some of that assholery, and as he approaches the end there are moments where he behaves with real human dignity. He gives his father, who grieves over the horrific death of his mother by taking to alcohol, a chance as well to redeem himself when he tells him that he will teach his daughter to play the violin.
Is it a good book? Sort of. I think its a wonderful, wonderful idea. What a great premise. And Niffenegger writes with great power, at times approaching a syntax that is almost poetic. She laces this book with a wide range of emotions, from the beautiful to the nauseating to the downright tragic. And that is impressive.
The one problem I have with the book is that Clare's character seems to be a bit too autobiographical. This is probably because we get a long description of her red air, and if you look at the dust jacket of the book you see that that is a trait Niffenegger shares with her protagonist. There are other things as well (they both live in Chicago, they both are artists).
And I don't know....when you read of Clare "courting" Henry in early 1990's Chicago, it just feels like the author has packed a lot of her own experience into the book. You'd expect that - everyone writes from their own experience, and its a first novel so you'd expect it even more so. But the intimacy and the length of the section just make me feel like we are a little too close to the author here, and for some reason I found it to be uncomfortable.
If Clare had had brown hair, maybe things would have been different.
But at any rate, an enjoyable work. I have a feeling I will try Niffenegger again. She has a name, for sure, that is impossible to forget.
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