See You Later, Dear

...At the other pole stands the 1985 film Back to the Future, a classic in its own way, about ultimately benevolent time travel and the chance of going backwards to make things better...

...As his eyes adjust, he sees tigers, cavemen with long spears, cavewomen wearing strategically modest skins, and wolfish dogs...

...Only a handful of books escape: Jack Finney's 1970 Time and Again, perhaps...

...Clare, alone at age thirty-five on February 2, 2007, "past hunger, past vanity, past caring," finds a letter Henry left for her, dated that December, saying he hopes his death "was simple and clean and unambiguous...

...As she says, "It's hard being left behind...

...And the darker vision is manifest in Ken Grim-wood's 1987 Replay, a rather underrated novel about a man who awakens in his eighteen-year-old body after a fatal heart attack at age forty-three—and tries to replay his life...

...And towards the end something quite ghastly happens to him on one of his trips...

...But from the time Clare reenters his life as an adult, there is no doubt but that they are in love—a deep, abiding love that sees them through courtship, marriage, miscarriages, and the birth of a daughter, Alba, who, it seems, inherits her father's strange propensity for traveling about in time...

...BY CYNTHIA GRENIER Audrey Niffenegger has written a singularly beguiling novel with an unexpectedly touching love story—even though, as she explains, her hero Henry and his wife Clare first met when he was thirty-six years old and she was six...

...Wells's 1895 The Time Machine to Kurt Von-negut's 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five...

...And you've left your wallet at home...

...Mark Twain's 1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court set in place the basic structure of backward travel: a modern man cast into the past for mostly comic but also a little bit of serious effect...

...Niffenegger is not interested in resetting his genetic clock...

...Connie Willis's two classics, the comic 1998 To Say Nothing of the Dog and the moving 1992 Doomsday Book...

...It's hard to be the one who stays...

...The prologue sets the tone for Henry's strange bounces through time and Clare's patient waiting for him, never knowing at what age or what moment he will reappear in her life...

...Heart racing, for a long liquor-befuddled moment he thinks, "I've gone all the way back to the Stone Age—until I realize that EXIT signs tend to congregate in the twentieth century...

...But forward travel spawned its darker versions, too, from H.G...

...Henry and Clare progress through the book, more or less in alternating time frames...

...At one moral pole of backward travel stands Ray Bradbury's 1952 story "A Sound of Thunder," a classic claim of the fragility of history, in which a tourist goes dinosaur-hunting on a time-traveling safari, accidentally kills a single butterfly, and returns to find Cynthia Grenier is a writer in Washington, D.C...

...There is humor in this curious tale, but bleak moments as well...

...It wouldn't be quite right to tell how the tale comes out, but I will say that Niffenegger was right to select—for a fitting close to a surprisingly satisfying book—lines from Homer's Odyssey that describe Odysseus's coming home at last to Penelope...

...More than one doctor has insisted that this little time-travel delusion of mine is due to schizophrenia...

...Meanwhile, forward travel through time quickly became a standard way of writing utopian literature, from Samuel Madden's 1733 Memoirs of the Twentieth Century to Edward Bellamy's 1887 American classic Looking Backward...

...Still, the science-fiction constraints and logic-puzzle burdens spoil most of this genre...

...For Henry—the unwilling traveler who, from time to time, inexplicably finds himself naked in some other time—this can be difficult...

...One doctor offers up the idea that Henry's genes are scrambled— Chrono-Displacement Disorder—but this is almost an aside...

...Sunday, June 16, 1968, 10:46 em...

...You can find the happy view echoed in, say, the 1993 film Groundhog Day, with Bill Murray awakening in the same day, over and over again, until he finally gets it right...

...the present badly altered...

...He wants to tell her: "Our love has been the thread through the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine I could ever trust...

...The Time Traveler's Wife ends—well, almost ends—when Henry seems to meet the death that he foresaw off and on in the earlier portions of the story...

...The working out of that little thirty-year problem is the burden, and the charming success of The Time Traveler's Wife...

...In some of Henry's time travels (all in a fairly limited time frame) he encounters people—in particular a beautiful, very unhappy woman named Ingrid— whose fate he knows but can do nothing about...

...and, now, Audrey Nif-fenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife...

...Time travel has been a staple plot device for a while, now...

...He is apt, for instance, to exist simultaneously at two different ages, as early on he is trying to explain his time adventures under the heading: "Saturday, January 2, 1988, 4:03 a.m...

...I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he's okay...

...She is writing about love—a love that transcends the usual boundaries of time...

...Periodically, Henry tries to figure out what is the matter with him...

...Then we shift to Henry, who explains, "It feels exactly like one of those dreams in which you suddenly realize that you have to take a test you haven't studied for and you aren't wearing any clothes...

...Henry is 24, and 5...

...Before they marry, he tells Clare that on an EEG he has the brain of a schizophrenic...

...On one trip, he begins by coming home half drunk from a night of dancing, fumbling for his keys, and falling down to his knees—only to look up to see a red, illuminated EXIT sign...