Genius Toiling in Obscurity

Mary Sue, The Time Traveler's Wife

After suffering through a series of perfectly adequate novels, it was a pleasure to get to The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. I rarely read a novel I just flat-out like as much as I liked this one. It's not just a fun read, it's a well-realized novel. Niffenegger succeeded in carrying her vision through the book. She imagined a story of a man who has a disorder that causes him to travel, randomly and uncontrollably through time, often to events in his own past or future. He meets his wife when she is just six years old, and the novel is the story of their relationship over the years. And she brings that strange story to life very ably.

I enjoyed Niffenegger's attention to the details of the situation she set up. For instance, absolutely nothing that is not a part of Henry's body travels through time with him. Eventually, he has a tooth pulled because he gets tired of losing the filling in it and having to replace it. That's some good thinking-through of implications.

I found myself wondering whether the novel is science fiction. Is any book with time travel in it science fiction? I decided that Niffenegger didn't think so when she was writing this. I can tell because she takes pain to keep her reader carefully oriented as to time and place. Although Henry moves chaotically through time, the story follows the chronology of his wife Claire's life. This not only helps the reader stay with the narrative, it sets up some terrific plotting. We might meet 40-year-old Henry when Claire is 16, and 32-year-old Henry when she's 18, and what those two Henrys know and how they reveal, or don't reveal, it, sets up multiple mysteries and questions that are answered one by one with satisfying coherence. Managing her plot and structure must have been a challenge during the writing of the book, and Niffenegger does it beautifully.

You can also tell she didn't think she was writing science fiction because every chapter begins with dates: the date the action takes place in, the date Henry is coming from. These are followed by Claire and Henry's ages (sometimes Henry is two ages. This is fun). Science fiction writers love to obfuscate. If there's any work to be done in keeping track of complicated things, the reader should be the one doing it, they figure. Niffenegger not only keeps track of dates for us, she has Henry simply give us, early on, a simple and clear explanation of his situation, another thing sci-fi writers eschew. It's no fun to just say, "On the planet Grthx, people practice a complex form of bisexual polygamy." No, you have to have K'than breakfasting with his wife in the first chapter, and lunching with his husband in the second, and let the reader keep up if she can. Niffenegger prefers to tell the reader straight-up what's going on, because she's more interested in the relationships between people. And so am I.

I digress. But my next point is a digression, too. I recently learned a highly useful concept: the Mary Sue. Coined in the realm of fan fiction, a Mary Sue is a character in a story who is a thinly-disguised version of the author. Usually the plot of the story represents wish-fulfillment for the writer. For instance, a Star Trek fan named Su might write a fanfic piece in which a character named S'u, who is impossibly beautiful and talented, saves the universe while having a sexual and romantic relationship with Su's favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation character. Work outside of fanfic can be Mary Sue work, too. Sometimes I see movies that seem to me like embarrassing portrayals of someone's adolescent fantasies; these wish-fulfillment works might be Mary Sues.

First novels about writers whose first novels achieve international best-sellerdom and win multiple awards are Mary Sue stories too.

It didn't occur to me early on that The Time Traveler's Wife was a Mary Sue. Oh, sure, I knew the main character was an impossibly beautiful redhead whose long hair has a life of its own and is integral to her character (she wouldn't be who she is with a Pixie cut). I knew she was a sculptor who got to have her dream studio because her time traveling sweetie brought home the winning numbers to an $8 million lottery one night. I knew her art shows got great reviews. And I knew that she was living an impossibly romantic and perfect love with Mr. Loose in Time. But none of that set off any warning bells.

And then I was about two-thirds of the way through the book and it accidentally fell open to the back-flap author photo as I was putting it down. And there was Niffenegger, her long red hair falling about her, framed in the backdrop of her art studio. And I thought, "Well, hell-o, Mary Sue!"

Very much worth reading nonetheless. Do give it a try.

Posted by Su Penn at December 17, 2003 05:40 PM | TrackBack