So, there’s been a TV series based on it recently. There was a movie several years earlier. There was a stage adaptation. And all this inspired by a cult novel of the not-very-prolific author. Yes, I’m talking about The Time Traveler’s Wife. And you have no clue how glad I am: That over times, some points in the discourse have changed.
At first, it was considered a very romantic story. But now we see that there are uncanny elements there. Cringy ones. Worse, some elements in the novel are plainly problematic. Let’s take a deep dive, ok?
So, the story takes place in Chicago and its roundabouts, and the main plot begins in 1990. Clare, a young artist, meets Henry, a librarian. What Henry knows is that he can travel in time, but he isn’t able to control it. What he doesn’t know is that he’s been meeting with Clare for years in the moments of his travels, meeting her for the first time when she was six. Yeah… yikes. During his travels, he was aware that one day, Clare would become his wife. Now, in his own times, he doesn’t remember. But Clare remembers everything. Including how she had her first sex with him when she was eighteen and he was forty. Child-grooming and a big age gap? Actually, only the first, since the real gap between Clare and Henry is eight years. Does it make the whole thread less problematic? Come on, it doesn’t. She remembers him as a person much older than her, as a guy who was helping her with her homework! And who was significantly older all that time. Another thing is that what was deemed romantic in the early 2000s may be no longer so. Even without the time-travelling controversies, it’s hard for me to see Henry and Clare as starcrossed lovers. She’s twenty, she still doesn’t know what to do with her life. She wouldn’t have grown up the same without Henry. And he’s twenty-eight, a guy with a stable job and simply more experience in everything. It isn’t equal. And it isn’t precisely about the numbers, either. If they were only several years older, the both of them… But they aren’t. And so you get a story of a child-groomed girl who meets a grown-up man. Is this romantic? Not to my mind.
If I were nit-picky, I could talk at length about other stuff in this novel which didn’t age well. About how keeping saying that an African-American character is “beautiful” is also fetishizing. About how disturbing it is when that character is the partner of Henry’s ex, and Henry’s ex is coded as an Irrational Vindictive Woman. About how the fact that the only other Black characters work for Clare’s family is quite telling as well. About how you get Jewish and Polish people, but their identity isn’t explored in the text. But I’m not that nit-picky. So I’ll focus on something else, on something which evidently pervades this novel.
You see, everything is so chic and classy here. Clare grows up as an old money. Henry reads Derrida. Clare is a contemporary sculptor. Henry is a bookworm. And they, of course, attend a hell bunch of cultural events. As a person who hasn’t been to any gallery for years and who watches You Tube videos on Derrida instead of reading him, I feel such a ruffian in comparison to these characters. But I doubt that snobism helps them, either. Are cult novels about that? About showing off the cultural codes you know, the artist you’ve seen, the philosophers you’ve read? Are people who don’t have cultural capital to do so are somebody worse? Is there a club you need to belong to? I hope that the answer is “no.” Not to mention that while only Clare is rich here, most characters have cultural capital. Henry may not be wealthy, but his parents were artists, and he has a degree. So yes, after all, this novel isn’t universal. It’s about classy, educated people. And that’s why sometimes I need a break from such narrations and read something from Barbara Kingsolver *sniffs*.
I don’t mean that this novel makes me angry. I don’t mean that everything here is irritating or problematic. If only there were no child-grooming and tokenism there, I would simply enjoy a story about Chicago and two people whose life is marred with the unbelievable. There were fragments I genuinely enjoyed and tropes which were refreshing (it was quite nice to read that Henry was good at cooking and Clare wasn’t). But I couldn’t forget about the worst part of The Time Traveler’s Wife. I can’t forget about child-grooming.
Please wait, you may say. You like classics, and even at the classics’ some threads are equally cringy and problematic. They are, of course they are. But usually, those problematic tropes aren’t the core of the story. Erase all the problematic things from Kristin Lavransdatter or One Hundred Years of Solitude and there’s still so much of the story. Erase the grooming from The Time Traveler’s Wife and suddenly, you miss half the plot. However, I’m not here to scold you, lest to claim that if you genuinely like this book, then you’re a secret paedophile. I’m not one to judge. And I think that we don’t need to like perfect texts, immaculate texts, to be good people.
Left Hand of Fiction 