The critical point in my understanding of The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger came about 1/3 of the way through the book.
"Henry sighs. "It's very charming of you to be ignorant of the twisted logic of most relationships. Trust me. When we met I was wrecked, blasted, and damned, and I am slowly pulling myself together because I can see that you are a human being and I would like to be one, too. And I have been trying to do it without you noticing, because I still haven't figured out that all pretense is useless between us. But it's a long way from the me you're dealing with in 1991 to me, talking to you right now from 1996. You have to work at me; I can't get there alone"
"Yes, but it's hard. I'm not used to being the teacher."
"Well, whenever you feel discouraged, think of all the hours I spent, am spending, with your tiny self. New math and botany, spelling and American history. I mean, you can say nasty things to me in French because I sat there and drilled you on them.""
So where does that leave me?
During the first hundred pages or so I found the book moderately interesting, but I could not relate to the characters. I didn't have to like them, or feel any kind of sympathy or similarity with them, but I found them inexplicable. A man in his 30s and 40s comes back through time and visits a little girl beginning at age 6. He continues to visit her through her 18th birthday. We learn that they are in love and that she will eventually marry him. But there is nothing in these ruminations on the part of both characters to help me understand why she falls in love with him.
But then of course I realized that the book isn't really about time travel. Nor is it a romance or a romantic novel even though the plot revolves around this relationship between Henry and Claire, that is unless one views romance as a dark creative process. But it is a novel shaped by and imbued with art, art as creative force, art as an idea, art and the creation of art as a the creation of a world unto itself. It is also a book about the creation of the self, about the balance of the inner and he outer life and how one needs both to be able to become "a human being". These are big difficult subjects, and am ambitious project. I believe the author managed to pull most of this together admirably well, although I think the book fails as a story, and would be perhaps better if it worked on that level as well.
Claire falls in love with Henry because she has already fallen in love with Henry when Henry first meets her. He knows her as he has come back from her future, and he shapes her into the person she is to become. Claire later meets Henry in her time, a Henry who does not yet know Claire, and she helps transform him into the Henry she knows, the same Henry who will later, in their joint temporal time go back and help Claire become the person she becomes. Many people, when they fall in love, think they can transform the other making themselves and the other better. Henry and Claire actually do this and their world becomes insular revolving only around themselves and the space they have made. This is not the way real life works however and the world interferes. But it doesn't really interfere with Henry and Claire. It throws obstacles their way and they absorb them or grow around them or apart from them. Henry and Claire's story is less about relationships than it is about art, how art is created and how it art itself creates something separate and outside life which at the same time contains and reflects back on life. Henry and Claire's story is less about Henry and Claire as two separate people who fall in love than it is about Henry's evolution as Henry and Claire as a part of Henry.
Note the names: Noble Henry, the ruler and the creator of himself. Henry's life is a work of art, and all of the novel revolves around Henry's development from small child exploring new worlds he does not understand (time travel) danger (arriving naked and exposed), despair (drug use and alcoholism) and eventually his redemption through Claire, about whom he is rather obsessive and understandably so. Now Henry's development mirrors the development of all children, who do not time travel, but who are faced everyday with new and complicated worlds which they must piece together as they form their own path to adulthood. And Henry leads a dual life. There is the outer Henry, who works in a library,who is an alcoholic and messed up punk until he meets Claire, and there is the archetypical Henry who travels through time, experiences danger and tragedy and shapes the life of both versions of Henry in the process.
Claire is less multi-dimensional than Henry in the novel. But note the name again, Claire, Henry's enlightenment. Claire is the artist. She is the artist who creates Henry as well as art, and she is the medium by which Henry creates himself and the materials he uses to shape her adulthood as well as his own.
Everything is circular in this book. The outside characters are shadows, not fully drawn, but also complete in their simple sketchiness. Each one has a role in the story. Each is defined by a few broad brushstrokes, at least in terms of how they relate to this relationship, the main story, the work of art that is Henry and Claire.
At times the book seemed to make no sense. Henry couldn't control where in time he went or when he travelled, but when he needed money to buy Claire a studio it was nothing to look up a future newspaper and remember the lottery numbers. Henry claimed to be reluctant to change the future, to do anything that would change the future, but he was altering it all the time, much the way a work of art builds on itself and doubles back and recreates itself in its own world, altering space and time.
There is a scene where Henry tells Claire there is something they have to watch, a big event, and it ends up being 9/11. But there is no other mention of it, as if it is something outside life, to be watched and then forgotten. But at the same time Claire goes through a series of miscarriages, often told in gut wrenching detail. The tragedy in the world is mirrored in the tragedy of the personal as this is a tale of the personal, of the microcosm that is Henry's life, the world that is also the creation of a work of art, in this case a work of art named Henry, who leaves a daughter named Alba, a daughter who is literally conceived in the maelstrom of Henry and Claire's overlapping lives.
As I have mentioned many times, art figures heavily in this book. Creation figures heavily. The psyche and the juxtaposition of the inner and the outer lives in the creation of personhood figure heavily. As I mentioned above it is not a simple book, and the author doesn't quite manage to pull it all together into a cohesive whole, but it was worth reading once I opened my mind to the possibilities, possibilities that may only be present in my own mind. But that, in the end, is one of the hallmarks of good fiction, that it opens our minds to connections and possibilities beyond the words on the page. Unfortunately it is not the only requirement. I personally would have preferred the book had it been more engaging as a story, and on this level I feel it failed. It remains a better book than many, and a book I am happy to have read.