Kristian Mercer

The Power of Romance

Yesterday I finished reading Audrey Niffenegger's novel The Time Traveler's Wife. I bought this book on a whim, largely because of a bookseller's recommendation.

"You're a librarian," she said. "And Henry, the hero, is a librarian. You'll love it."

Well, I bought the book and put it on my to-be-read pile. And it stayed there for two years. In fact, I finally started to read it simply because Nephele Tempest of The Knight Agency mentioned it as one of her favorite books. Since I had enjoyed many of the other titles on Nephele's list - which included Possession by A.S. Byatt and A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray - and since I hope to pitch to Nephele at the upcoming Emerald City Writer's Conference, I thought I'd better give it a try.

In case you haven't had a chance to read this novel, The Time Traveler's Wife is the story of Henry, a time-traveling librarian, and Clare, the woman who loves him. Henry can't control his time-traveling abilities. His life shifts randomly between the past and the future; his only constant is the fear of losing his grip on the present.

Well, and Clare. Clare is the person Henry always returns to. She is his center, as in John Donne's poem A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, for it is her firmness in time - her very linearality, if I may coin a word - that allows Henry to end where he begins.

I wish I could say that I fell in love with this book from the very beginning, but I wasn't truly invested until about halfway through. And I think it was because it took me that long to appreciate how Niffenegger played with traditional concepts of time, and love, and inevitability. How her storyline was one great, circular arc that allowed her characters to touch, and retreat, and finally intersect at a single point - much like the compass of Donne's poem.

When I turned the last page, I was crying. My husband asked me if I were crying because the book was sad or because (he knows me so well) it had a happy ending. I told him it was both.

Because The Time Traveler's Wife doesn't have the HEA ending that we have come to expect in our romance novels. There isn't a sunset scene, nor even an epilogue that allows us to see Henry and Clare content in their married life.

In fact, their story is most like a romance of the classic sense, as defined by Northup Frye:

"The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him...[his isolation] has the effect of a spirit passing out of nature."

But despite how "special" Henry is, there is also something very ordinary about him. Something that pins him to the mortal plane, something that makes him accessible - and that is his love for Clare. "We will see each other again," he writes to her. "I love you, always. Time is nothing."

And so The Time Traveler's Wife has its own extraordinary happily-ever-after. It is a story that celebrates the power of love over absence, over grief - and, of course, over time. And that, I think, is why we read - and write - romance.