I ended up reading this book practically in one day. I haven’t done that in a long, long time and it’s something I’ve missed in my reading, so if nothing else, I’m grateful to Niffenegger for writing a book that would capture me so. And I'm even more grateful that the book made me cry. I was weeping. Sobbing. It's been a great while since a book has moved in that way.

What’s most intriguing to me in this story is that while Clare has known Henry most of her life, Henry actually has no recollection of these meetings once the meet in present time. So Henry doesn’t begin to travel back to meet Clare until they’ve been together for a while – BUT do you think Clare would ever have met Henry if he hadn’t started coming to see her? But I guess he doesn’t come to see her until after he’s met her (in present time?) Very confusing, I know, but I actually think Niffenegger does a pretty good job of keeping it all together. I loved seeing them meet for the first time through Clare’s eyes – and then through Henry’s eyes. And how Henry must restrain himself in later years as Clare becomes a woman because he’s seeing her with all the desire and love he has for his wife, Clare.

The idea of the story is so compelling – the idea of visiting the love of your life at a time before they met you. I’ve often wished for fly on the wall status of my love’s past life – just to see him interact. To see what he looked like. To hear his voice all the while knowing that he would be mine one day. Bringing that love along on my travels. I’m sometimes jealous of the people that knew him then. I think in the end it’s that I feel my love is all encompassing – and I’m missing some key elements. (Okay. I’ll try not to get too gushy!)

For me, these were the best parts of the book – meeting Clare in the Meadow. Henrys of all different times meeting each other – taking care of each other. Which begs the question – if a Henry from the past time didn’t help Henry of the future time wouldn’t Henry die? But isn’t that changing things? I love that Henry old teaches Henry young to survive by pickpocketing and picking locks etc. So Clare gets pregnant by a younger Henry after present day Henry has a vasectomy - is that cheating? Do you love the person you're with RIGHT NOW? Or do you love them always? Like Clare loves the Henry she meets in real life - but it's the older Henry she fell in love with. As confusing as it was at times (and I don't think it was really all that confusing) I thought this idea - love the Henry you're with sort of thing - was very intriguing.

Some things I thought didn’t work – I thought people were a bit too accepting of the circumstances – which I guess is a conceit the author needs to have the book work at all – but sometimes it seemed a little to neat that everyone close to Henry and Clare just kind of accepted things. I would think a bigger stink would’ve been made – also – it could’ve upped the conflict if someone – anyone – wanted to out him. I kept thinking Gomez would be the one. Or Ingrid – but I’m not sure if Ingrid really knew what was going on.

Also, there’s no straight through conflict in this book. I mean, I guess you could make the argument that Henry staying alive is the conflict. It can’t be Clare and Henry meeting in real life because the book starts out with that. It can’t be them having a child – because that happens to late to be cohesive. I think that if Niffenegger would have been able to come up with a conflict that ties the whole book together – a conflict that lends motive and tension to Henry’s (or Clare’s) actions and decisions throughout the book – one that’s able to transcend the time travel, then she would’ve had something really amazing. I’m not talking necessarily anything like they have to get to a certain time to save the world, or he needs to warn her about something awful – I’m talking a thread, a spine if you will, for the book – something from which all of their actions can grow. I teach my students that it’s one of the most necessary ingredients in telling a story. I’m convinced that this book LACKS one – but since the idea of the story and the characters are so, so compelling – it carries us away in a way that most books could not.

I think she’s written three-dimensional characters in Henry and Clare, which is another factor in how we can tear through 500 pages. They are real in a sense that they make mistakes, bad decisions, good decisions. They love and fight and have conflict in their personalities. We want to know more about them so we keep reading – flaws and all. We could (although I do think this is of a higher level) compare this book to plot driven novels – like a Grisham or Crichton or something on that level – only TTW is character driven – with an intriguing twist thrown in. We read because we want to know these people. We become attached to the characters. We have empathy for their plight.

In the end, I think the writing is quite lazy at times – she takes short-cuts wherever she can – telling us the fifteen restaurants and stores they go to on any given afternoon (half the time I had no idea what city they were in – I kept having to remind myself). Using proper names as description (“the room looked like it was straight out of a Pottery Barn catalog”) is the ultimate copout in writing. It’s a good thing she was so strong in her character development and managed to keep the whole time travel consistent, because otherwise I’d say it was crap. ;-)

Since we’ve all been thinking about time travel, of course, I thought I’d ask where everyone would like to be if they could go back. My answer – December 19, 1980 – sneaking into Madison Square Garden to a Bruce Springsteen concert (The River Tour) with the man who is now my husband! Seriously. I’m nuts!

Whew. Okay – go to it folks!

And if you need anymore assistance in getting things going, here are the discussion questions the publisher has provided:

-- On the novel's first page Clare declares, "I wait for Henry." In what way does this define her character, and how is the theme of waiting developed throughout the book?

-- Just as Clare is defined by her waiting, so Henry is defined by his unpredictable comings and goings. That-along with his hard drinking and proclivities for stealing and beating people up-might be described as stereotypically masculine behavior, just as waiting might be called stereotypically feminine. What keeps these characters from being stereotypes? In what ways does the author give them depth and nuance? For example, at what points in the book do Henry and Clare reverse roles?

-- Niffenegger portrays Henry's time traveling as the result of a genetic disorder, which is explained at some length later on. How plausible is this explanation-not from a scientific point of view, but from a dramatic or literary one? Do you think that Henry's condition requires an explanation?

-- How has Henry's personality been shaped by his bouts of chrono-displacement? How does his time traveling affect Clare? In addition, how is Clare affected by meeting her future husband when she is six and seeing him repeatedly throughout her childhood and adolescence before they become lovers? How does the author manage to make their relationship seem eccentric-and even enchanted-rather than sinister?

-- What is the particular significance of Henry's job as a librarian? What connection do you see between his choice of career and his childhood fascination with the Field Museum (pp. 27-36)?

-- Along with his frequent trips backward and forward in time, the critical event in Henry's early life is the hideous death of his mother, which he witnesses as a child and revisits compulsively as an adult (pp. 110-14). How has this event helped shape him and how does it foreshadow other events in the novel?

-- How does the author manage her novel's fantastically intricate time scheme? For example, where in her narrative does she relate the same incident from different perspectives in order to supply missing information? How does she foreshadow such developments as Ingrid Carmichel's suicide, the birth of Alba DeTamble, and Henry's death?

-- Among the curiosities of the book is the way chrono-displacement occasionally causes its protagonists to split and double. At the age of nine Henry is taught pickpocketing by his twenty-seven-year-old self (pp. 50-6); Henry returns to his thirty-three-year-old wife after making love to her on her eighteenth birthday (pp. 402-414). After Henry has a vasectomy at the age of thirty-seven, Clare becomes pregnant by a thirty-three-year-old "surrogate" (pp. 363-5). How do Henry and Clare view their younger and older selves? Why, for one thing, aren't they ever jealous of them? And what are this novel's implications about the relationship between time and the self?

-- In theory Henry's time traveling should make him omniscient-at least as far as his own timeline is concerned-but Clare knows things about him that he does not. What accounts for this? What role does the characters' knowledge-and the gaps in their knowledge-play in the novel?

-- Closely related to the theme of foreknowledge is the idea of free will. Does Henry's chrono-instability give him a freedom that Clare lacks, or does it make him more powerless? Discuss Henry's observation that "there is only free will when you are in time, in the present" (p. 58).

-- When Henry asks her to describe her artwork, Clare tells him that it's about birds and longing (p. 15). How do the themes of birds-along with wings and flight-and longing figure elsewhere in this book?

-- What is the List that Henry makes for Clare, and how does it give the book dramatic momentum? Does Niffenegger employ other devices to similar effect? One of the things that makes a story suspenseful is the reader's sense that events are reaching a climax, that time is running out. How is Niffenegger able to impart this sense to her readers, given Henry's seemingly inexhaustible supply of time?

-- Both Gomez and Celia warn Clare about Henry. "This guy would chew you up and spit you out . . . He's not at all what you need," says Gomez (p. 420). Can we simply chalk those warnings down to jealousy, or might the observers be correct? Is Henry more ruthless and amoral than he appears to Clare? How do you interpret Henry's statement: "I'm not exactly the man she's known from earliest childhood. I'm a close approximation she is guiding surreptitiously toward a me that exists in her mind's eye" (p. 149)?

-- How does Henry and Clare's relationship change following their marriage? How is it affected by their desire for a child?

-- Would you call The Time Traveler's Wife a comedy or a tragedy, or are such classifications relevant to a work that plays havoc with time and allows one character to appear periodically after his death?

-- How does the author use time travel as a metaphor: for love, for loss and absence, for fate, for aging, for death? To what extent are Clare and Henry a "normal" couple?

Some further links:

An interview with Niffenegger

Niffenegger is a print artist as well as a writer. Here is a link to her gallery page.

A review in the Washington Post

A review in the Boston Globe

A review and interview from The Guardian

A review in the USAToday

Thanks for participating!

- An interview with Audrey Niffenegger and a review on Bookslut.

- An essay by the author on Powell's.

- An interview with the author on bn.com.