Ein jeder Engel ist Schrecklich

WARNING: I reserve the right of spoilers for both The Time Traveler's Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry in this post.  Proceed at your own risk.

    Audrey Niffenegger permeated my vacation.  At times, she was welcome and expected.  At times, I did everything I could to push her out the front door, green-bean casserole and all, saying, "No, Audrey, I wasn't having a party.  Thanks for the food, but I really don't know what you're doing here..."

    Last week (oh gosh, was it really only last week?) a movie came out in theaters that I refused to see.  I said to myself myself, I said, "Mary, promise me right now that you're not going to see this movie until you've read the book again, until you feel encased in it again, warm inside of it like it were an electric blanket and you weren't worried about carcinogens.  Promise me."  So I did.  I promised myself that I would not rest, I would not sleep for an instant until the book was reread.  But first I decided to take a road trip.

    My family does its best reading in the car listening to audiobooks, so I downloaded a [gloriously $9.95-and-yet-still-unabridged] copy of Time Traveler's Wife from the iTunes Store.  I hopped over to my MacBook, uploaded the book onto my iPod Touch (obvious plug - I heart iTunes and all things Apple related) and I was on my way from misery to happiness today.  Uh huh uh huh uh huh uh huh...

    Some 16 hours later (only about 10 of those included listening to the book) we were in Rhode Island and I was forced to put TTW out of my mind for a week.  But that didn't stop good ole Audrey.

    You see, by chance, by fate, by acts of omniscient God, a previous post did me some tangible good and midweek last week I came into possession of a real-life, hold-me-touch-me Advanced Reader's Copy of Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger's second book.  I was like a giddy school-girl when this thing actually came in the mail, because up until that point I had had a nagging feeling that the correspondence I had had with the Literary group that was going to give me said ARC had all been some elaborate hoax.  Maybe it was for those Russian mail-wives who have been emailing me all these years to finally get my real address.  Almost as soon as we set foot on solid ground in Rhode Island, Audrey II was in my hand and I was reading.  

    In fact, I was feeling a little sick and down this past Sunday, so I stayed home from all the galavanting my mother, father, aunt, and uncle were doing, and then spent the whole day reading until I was finished.

    Then the rest of the week went by, much to all of our chagrins, as it was our last vacation of the summer and the last time I would see my aunt in who-knows-how-long, and on Thursday morning, we got back into the Chryssie the big red Chrysler and started up the audiobook.  

    Seven-and-change hours later (plus a bunch of time spent Audrey-less in Scranton and State College) Clare DeTamble was a gray, old woman and Henry was visiting her for the very last time.  And I breathed a sigh, because not only was my favorite book once again over, but that meant that Audrey would finally leave me alone.

    But the sheer existence of this post is proof that she didn't.  She's still hanging around, like a soul that couldn't quite let go, and I find myself thinking about her for strange reasons and at strange times.  I woke up too early the other morning and started wondering absently if my lost twin's ghost had brushed an icy hand over my hair.  I got deja vú and wondered if I'd found some fold in time, and I worried that some other copy of myself was stuck out of reach in a subzero parking garage.  I'll day dream, imagining this Audrey that I don't know, seeing her fall in love with Henry like I did, and feeling her pain as she mutilated and ended him.  And I'll try to see her face as she conjures up Robert and Elspeth, as she paints pictures of Highgate Cemetery with words so that people like me can imagine countries they've never seen.  She literally haunts both my waking and sleeping hours.

    Last week, when the mail came with my ARC of Her Fearful Symmetry, I was simultaneously given a charge to write this post.  After actually reading the book, I struggled mutely for days, wondering if I should actually be a good Christian and keep my promise.  But after re-finishing The Time Traveler's Wife, I've come to the conclusion that, in short, "That which does not kill me makes me stronger."

    I've got to hand the proverbial "it" to Audrey: she did manage to steer quite clear of the formidable temptation of authors whose first novels are bestsellers--to write its twin over and over again.  She left her mark--there is an obvious whiff of Niff on every page--but Time Traveler's Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry aren't even close cousins of each other.  They're set in different places and cultures with completely different characters and focuses.  I could tell from the first chapter that I was going to be satisfied by at least this heartwarming truth: Audrey is not an idiot.

    TTW jumps around quite a bit.  The structure for the whole book is based loosely on the timeline of Clare's life, but due to Henry's furry little problem, time and space are manipulated in such a way as to have a lurching effect on the reader.  This feeling is not anything unpleasant, and in fact accounts for at least part of why I love the book so much.  TTW is completely unique in the way it trusts the reader to just keep on trucking.  HFS does this as well, though I'm afraid some of the grace is lost because everyone in HFS is firmly grounded in the here and now, so chapters jump between story lines with no confirmation that it is only space that is being hurdled, not time as well.  A character will mention that a year has passed since an event of two chapters ago, and I will frown slightly, flip backwards to investigate, and eventually conclude that that must have just been a supremely boring year.

    TTW also has no plot.  Los siento.  There is probably a discernible climax, but it is so not because everything prior leads up to it and everything following leads away, but because it's the part where your emotions are thrown aboard the Andrea Gail and asked to quietly wait for the storm to pass.  The book works more like a television series, where each chapter or so is a short episode, with the familiar characters as the glue that keeps you wanting to watch every week, until finally the credits role for the season finale and you reluctantly turn off the set, knowing you're going to buy the DVDs when they come out.  In TTW, the characters are so compelling, their life stories so fascinating and real, and everything is so close to you like family that you don't realize it's coming from nowhere and has no particular destination in mind.

    HFS also has no plot.  It has a beginning, it has a middle, and it has something that looks like it tried to be an ending, but again there are more fragments than there is full vision, and the twist at the end is the high point of the action in the same way a random hiccup is the high point of a coma.  Not to say that HFS is as completely devoid of action as a coma, but you wouldn't expect coma guy to have a lung spasm, and I didn't expect...well...anything at the end of that book.  

    The way I see it, which could be very narrow-minded, I realize, Audrey tried to have a character-driven-plot without any substantial characters.  I couldn't discern the "main characters" from the supporting roles, because by the end I felt most familiar with the two people who seemed to have meant the least to the overall story, Martin and Marijke.  When they were taken out of the picture towards the end, I almost wished Henry and Clare would waltz in and restore some balance.  There was no glue, there was no timeline.  In the end I was lost, and I wanted things Audrey and her characters weren't giving me.

    As I had TTW read to me this week, I realized I must have skipped over a good portion of the book the first time I read it, because I did not remember there being that much sex, and in that brusque a style.  Don't get me wrong, I don't think sex in and of itself is a foul beast in need of literary vanquishing, and I understand that Romance is the best-selling genre of novel.  But with sex, as with profanity in my opinion, less is so often much more.  

    If a character goes through the whole book without uttering a single curse, and then suddenly lets loose on some guy because he uses the word "retard," it sends a clear message.  With sex, it's not so much the message, as the intimacy.  In ancient Greek plays, characters always died offstage.  I don't remember why that was, but it's a concept that's stuck with me.  Our deaths, like our sex, are not things we want a lot of strange people to witness unless there's something monumental in them that they need to know and understand.  And if it's overdone, it feels like the reader is intruding on something.  Or like it's just porn.  And that's two-bit stuff; not fit for a serious book.

   Sadly, I think HFS could have done with a bit more sex.  But I appreciated the times when it loomed awkwardly on inopportune horizons and was taken out of the options menu, because I really didn't want Martin to have random sex with the unorthodox-but-still-literal-girl-next-door the day before he got to go see Marijke.  That would have made things worse.

    Anyway.  Now you know.  Or maybe you don't; maybe I skirted around the topic, because I'm still not comfortable with the idea of this post.  So let me say it plain.  

    I didn't like Her Fearful Symmetry.  I was evidently a poor steward of your trust, Audrey, and for that, I apologize.  There were other, more-deserving people who had to do without an ARC because I had stolen theirs.  I'm sorry I didn't like it, because it seems a lot of people did.  I always look for characters, and I couldn't find any this time.

    None of this changes anything, really.  But I have developed a deeper love for The Time Traveler's Wife.  And I have started writing again myself, something I’ve sadly forgone for months now.  So I certainly don't dislike Audrey Niffenegger.  If anything, I appreciate her now more than ever.

<3 spadeALLcross