We Are Totally Normal

(I was tempted to title this post "Love in the Time of Coronavirus", but a Google search instantly established that, uh, it's been done.)

As I keep muttering to myself while pacing back and forth in my living room, "The government-mandated shelter-in-place order is a great opportunity to get caught up on reading!" My main reading project at the moment is my long-anticipated "Capital and Ideology". Thanks to the indefinite closure of the county library system, it looks like I may end up having three months or so to make my way through this 1000+ page tome. Unfortunately, it isn't exactly light reading. One of countless ironies of this period is that while I feel like I ought to have plenty of time to read things, my actual attention span has been badly fragmented, so wending my way through thousands of years' worth of interwoven economic, social and political history is, uh, taking a while.

Which is one of many reasons why I was relieved when my pre-ordered copy of We Are Totally Normal landed in my mailbox last week. This young-adult novel weighs in at a much more palatable 200+ pages, and its tales of high-school drama and early loves are resonating a lot more with me now than the evolution of trifunctional societies.

As with Naomi's earlier book, Enter Title Here, WATN did a great job at transporting me back to my own high-school years and remembering long-forgotten details of that era. Where ETH mostly took place within the academic year and focused on classes and grades and college applications, WATN is almost entirely about the social life outside of school: the parties and friend groups and rumors and chats. One of many things that WATN nails is how much of high school socializing is waiting for people to show up: hearing that someone is on their way, hanging out with others by a car, talking about what you're going to do once they finally get there.

MINI SPOILERS

WATN is primarily a love story, but it's also deeply about popularity, in much the same way ETH was about success.  The book is a great, constant reminder that the concept of popularity is very subjective and depends on the eye of the beholder. In the early pages of this book, I thought of the protagonist Nandan as an introvert, mostly because he's following Pothan and Ken and being literally and figuratively driven by their goals. But, in his later conversations with Dave and others outside of his primary social circle, we quickly learn that he's actually on the popular side of the school: lots of other people like and admire him and want to be around him.

Throughout the whole book, Nandan has a singular focus on power and control, seeing almost every social interaction as a dominance hierarchy. Particularly in the back third or so of the story, he thinks a lot about who has power, how it's used, how it flows over the course of a night. As badly as he wants love, he seems to want power even more. One of the lowest emotional points in the book comes when someone (I think Avani?) tells him "You're not a leader" after he goes swimming in the lake and discovers that nobody followed him. This seems much more devastating to him than the romantic and sexual obstacles he encounters, which he tends to take more in stride, as opposed to his bitter fixation on whether people like Avani see him as important.

This whole concept is pretty foreign and fascinating to me! Unlike a lot of the other dynamics in this book, I have no memory of thinking that way in high school, of categorizing people into hierarchies and worrying about my place in that structure. I do think I was very fortunate to have a stable and drama-free group of friends, though; my experience was probably more like Mari's, and I get the feeling Mari is also baffled at how Nandan sees the world. It is intriguing to think that there's this whole elaborate, high-stakes fraught political game being played immediately adjacent to people who have no idea that it exists and wouldn't care about it if they knew.

While I can't directly relate to the game, though, I hugely enjoyed reading about it. There's a large number of characters making up The Ninety-Nine and other social factions in Nandan's high-school world, and each of them are vividly and crisply defined. You get a really good sense of who each person is, how they fit into this org chart, and can swiftly get caught up in their drama: so-and-so was childhood friends with her, then they drifted apart, but still want to be friends, but it's hard because she doesn't like her girlfriend, and so on.

Oh! Have I mentioned yet that this is a gay romance novel? It is!

I keep wanting to describe the story as "sweet", and compared to ETH it is, but "sweet" isn't quite the right word for it. It is really cute to read about Nandan crushing on Dave, picking up on the signals being returned, navigating the joys and awkwardness of a new relationship. But it isn't an unfettered joy, and the way the story focuses on Nandan's internal obstacles rather than external roadblocks makes this an occasionally moody, often raw romance.

MEGA SPOILERS

I have to admit that I don't have much experience with the romance novel genre, either gay or het, so I can't easily compare WATN to other books. Reading through it, though, I was reminded of how quickly the #discourse on sexuality has changed within my lifetime. I grew up not knowing what the word "gay" meant, thinking it was just a bad word used to taunt people. I didn't personally know any gay people until I was... maybe sixteen or seventeen years old. Soon after I became an adult, the push for gay civil rights entered the mainstream political conversation, led by a "We're born this way!" push that aligned sexuality with race: it was presented as an immutable and unchangeable element, as ludicrous to deny as denying the color of someone's skin. That presentation may have helped the startlingly quick legal triumphs in courts and then in legislatures to enshrine recognition and rights for gay relationships. But today that sense of immutability is itself rejected within the movement on the left: we embrace fluidity, question rigid categorization, and look at "They're born that way!" as an embarrassing anachronism that denies people their agency and freedom.

All that being said, I think WATN is a perfect novel for the present moment. I think that in an earlier generation the act of being gay itself would be radical and exciting, plenty of drama to drive a story on its own. The stereotypical queer pop-culture story goes like "Guy doesn't feel like he fits in, then discovers that he's gay, and then everything makes sense and is better, the end." I think we've seen lots of stories where people question their straight sexuality and it leads them into discovering that they're gay, and I personally have never seen a portraying of someone questioning their gay identity after they've come out. Nandan is buzzing with uncertainty and doubt. At every stage of his relationship with Dave he questions himself: Why am I not more excited? Should this feel better? Is it me, or us? This is coupled with an occasional level of self-disgust: he feels like he's coated in an oily sheen, or becomes uncomfortably aware of what their tongues are doing, which in turn causes him to wonder if maybe he's actually straight after all.

But this story isn't undercutting or denying queerness, at all. These are all deeply human experiences. Being a teenager, being full of hormones, reconciling your lived experiences with the frameworks you've learned through culture, desperately wanting an ideal and receiving reality instead: of course that's at least as difficult for queer kids to navigate through as straight kids! It's a journey for everyone, and some details may be different for different people, but we don't come out knowing all the answers, and even if we somehow did, those answers can change over time as we and our circumstances change. And that's fine. Well, "fine". It's often stressful and confusing. But also exciting and liberating and a huge part of what makes us human.

END SPOILERS

A few final random thoughts:

This was probably my favorite passage:

He just wanted to be loved. Or not even that. Actually that's the crazy thing - it's hard to feel loved. What really feels good is when somebody else is willing to accept your love. He was walking around with all this love in his pockets and nobody to spend it on.

That really resonates with me. Nandan can sometimes get so caught up in his capers and schemes that he doesn't see what's in front of him, but he can also be incredibly perceptive and empathetic.

I don't read many YA novels, and I'm not sure how much of the youth dialogue is from how kids today actually talk, and how much is based on what they read. The word that keeps giving me pause is "LOL". Do people actually say "Ell oh ell" now? Or "Loll"? Or is it an idiomatic replacement for "He laughed," much as earlier generations of novels might have written "Ha!"? I am a dinosaur.

There is really awesome, specific grounding in the Bay Area. More specifically in the stretch around Los Gatos and along Highway 17 into Santa Cruz. I used to live and work in that area, and I loved all the accurate details that get mentioned in passing like the crashed cars off of Skyline. Stuff like this isn't explained within the book but is instantly recognizable to locals, and wonderfully connects the novel to our time and place.

Overall I think that We Are Totally Normal is a warmer and more heartfelt book than Enter Title Here. ETH had a more shocking and outrageously funny energy, while WATN has more lovable characters. I'd like to personally spend time with most of the people in this book. And that's not just the quarantine talking!

Games As Literature? Okey-Dokey

Any time I write about a visual novel game, I feel the need to preface it by saying "I don't play many visual novels," which feels increasingly inaccurate as the number of entries in this tag grows. While by now I've completed a good half-dozen or so, though, I'm very aware that the ones I'm attracted to are outliers, that consciously seek to challenge the tropes of the form. Which, again, is odd, since it means that I've spent many more hours playing critiques of visual novels than I have playing "normal" visual novels.

This has been true of the Christine Love games, which remain some of my all-time favorites, and is true as well for Doki Doki Literature Club, a free Steam game that has exploded in popularity, through... hm, I wanted to say "word of mouth", but everyone is very hesitant to go into much detail about it. The Love Conquers All games play with the genre's form, subverting it and critiquing it, but ultimately embrace it. DDLC, on the other hand, sometimes seems to be out to destroy the genre: cutting right to the heart of gaming in general, but visual novels in particular, exposing some serious problems with the structure and content of such games and, ultimately, kind of calling for action.

So: Visual novels can be about anything, can be told in any sort of voice, can have a variety of gameplay elements or no gameplay at all. However, from what I can tell, the most popular forms of visual novels (at least in the US) are "dating simulators". In its most stereotypical form, you play as a first-person (never seen) male protagonist, moving through a story that sort of doubles as a harem of eligible women, selecting dialogue and action that will prompt one (or more) of them to fall in love with you: you generally "win" by having a mate at the end of the game.

MINI SPOILERS

At first glance, DDLC is a note-perfect addition to this turnkey formula. It's set in a school. You are a somewhat aimless student. Your childhood friend invites you to join the literature club, which you quickly learn is full of "four incredibly cute girls!" Each has their own distinctive personality quirk, easily-recognizable interest, and is very motivated to get to know you better.

The actual gameplay feels rather light. You almost never get dialogue options, and can't influence your player character's personality or story: you love manga, don't read many books, are slightly shy, and want to get along with everyone. The insertion of gameplay is one early unique element in the game: at the end of each night, you write a poem. You do this by selecting from a series of words. Chibi versions of the love interests appear on the screen and will react as you select them: between this and the in-game dialogue, you can get a sense for what type of content each person prefers, and can write a poem that will appeal to them.

As a side note: I opted to impress Yuri, mostly because she's the least child-like character. The dialogue focuses on the idea that she prefers poems that have a lot of imagery and symbolism, but from what I can tell, she actually prefers scientific words (universe, infinity, etc.) and complex multi-syllabic words. Actual imagery and symbolism (rainbow, flower, etc.) count as "cute" words and will appeal to Natsuki instead.

Anyways: For the first half or so of the game, the gameplay mostly consists of doing one of these poem-writing exercises, then just "click to continue" for 20+ minutes of dialogue for the next day, then repeating with a new poem. You do get some opportunities to decide in what order you will show your poem to the others, which slightly affects dialogue but doesn't count as a major choice. I think there's just one proper in-scene choice, where you choose who to side with during an argument.

This segment of the game is long and played very straight. I'd avoided any detailed spoilers, but, well, just the opening screen of the game gives a hint that something is coming, and my radar was activated for any signs of incoming strangeness. There are just a handful of lines over the first couple of hours that indicate everything is not what it seems: occasionally someone will say something slightly odd, or do something without any explanation. This is mostly addressed in-game through your character's own reactions. Later on in the week, some of your classmates' poems grow increasingly unsettling, but "you" respond by going "That's kinda weird, but hey, I don't know much about literature."

As I was playing, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. I kept waiting for a really long time. I'm uncertain whether this long wind-up is necessary... I kinda felt like the pattern was established after the first day or two, and it honestly got a little painful to sit through the longish, stereotypically drawn-out-but-inconclusive scenes with Yuri.

MEGA SPOILERS

In retrospect, though, the long time spent in the first act pays strong dividends in the later ones. By setting so much content in place, the eventual turn feels much more meaningful and less gimmicky than it would with a shorter story. The sheer amount of material almost wears grooves in your mind while playing, its very repetition establishing "this is how things are", and so once that material changes, the difference feels profound.

This is most obvious in the text and disturbing art, but what I'm thinking of now is actually the music: that happy ditty theme-song constantly plays for hours as you play, long past the point where you stop paying attention to it, where it becomes purely ignorable background music. So it is DEEPLY unsettling when just a few notes in that song change to a minor key. This slight diabolical chord instantly sends shivers down your spine: even absent any other signifiers, you are alerted that something is wrong, the center is decaying.

It's around this time that I decided to continue playing the game during a well-lit weekend afternoon. I can enjoy horror, but those early elements were already freaking me out enough that I knew I didn't want to go to bed in the middle of it.

So: The game takes an abrupt out-of-tone turn, coming to a shockingly sad end. And that's where the weirdness really starts to kick in. You're taken back to the main title screen, but it's different now: letters in the menu have been corrupted, as have some character images. And you'll quickly find that your save game files have all been deleted!

Pressing on, you start a new game, but it's... different from before. Nonsense text appears on the screen at random intervals. After a false start, and then another, it starts again, but a bit differently: the overall plot and thrust of the game is the same, but the details are different. A sense of malaise hovers at the edge of the dialogue. Visuals glitch. The music grows ever more unsettling, like a nightmare calliope.

The limited gameplay now feels like a tight constriction: before I might have aesthetically preferred more freedom to express myself, but now it's like I'm tied into a straitjacket, loaded onto a crash-test car, hurtling forward towards something awful, with no opportunity to escape.

There's a compelling sense of mystery at this stage of the game: it's obvious that Things Are Not Okay, but who is behind it? And why? My suspicions were directed towards Monika from early on, but as time goes on and everyone's behavior grows more erratic, it became increasingly difficult to discount Yuri as being the architect of whatever was going on. Still, I tend to be stubborn in my gameplay, so even as it seemed like a worse and worse idea, I continued along the Yuri track.

Around this time, the game starts actively fighting you, in some really fun and surprising ways. When prompted to choose who you will spend time with, you come to find that you're fighting the mouse cursor, which keeps gradually shoving over towards "Monika" while you try to move it elsewhere. Soon after, it blocks you from saving the game, telling you there's no point any more.

After yet another horrific "ending", the game further degrades, with you seemingly stuck inside a loop in a macabre scene as corrupted text spews out. After spending ages clicking through, I tried reloading earlier saved games or exiting and restarting, but no matter what you do you're immediately taken back to that sad scene. At last stuff gets cleaned up, the fourth wall gets torn down, and the plot is explained.

The game gets awesome here - I don't even want to talk about it in the Mega Spoilers, but it simultaneously gets less mysterious and more chilling. It evokes one of the best bits of Analogue: A Hate Story, but with even better ludonarrative harmony. I figured out pretty early on how to proceed, but the dialogue (or, okay, monologue) around this point is so good that I let it play out for another cycle before proceeding. (It's great to see that the game is so explicit about what you need to do: people who already know can feel like they're one step ahead of the game, while everyone else can get unblocked, and learn something new in the process.)

The final coda is refreshing, then surprising. I was actually down to explore the Sayori arc a bit more - as long as she isn't actively murdering people, it doesn't seem like it's necessarily that bad - but the "Shut it all down!" ending is super-satisfying, both in-game and in real life.

Anyways: I've kind of recapped the plot without getting into any of the themes, which is at least as memorable as the formal trickery. The story focuses on something that I've been worrying about for years, in my own games as well as those I play: non-player character agency in video games. I wrote about it at some length in my Shadowrun devlog, and DDLC tackles it head-on.

So: Ultimately, characters aren't real people. They're created by writers and developers to fulfill certain roles. This is also true in fictional novels and comic books and all sorts of media. In video games, though, this can seem especially pernicious, because the player interacts with these "people", and they respond to him or her.

First up, there's this ambiguity of identity between the player and the player character. To what extent are these purely fictional relationships being forged between the in-game avatar and the other NPCs, and to what extent is a relationship being created between the real-life player and those same characters (or, I would argue, the creator of those characters)? If you've ever done something nice in a game, and had an NPC say "Thank you for helping me, CHARNAME! You are a good person!", you might have gotten a small, warm, fuzzy feeling in your stomach. "That's right," you might have said. "I am a good person!" We create identification between our real selves and our fictional virtual selves, and derive pleasure from the achievements of the latter.

That pleasure generally increases as characters grow more believable and complex. But, as players grow more focused and invested in the game, they can start to ascribe too much meaning and importance to these fundamentally artificial and unrealistic relationships. It's a step beyond, say, reading romance novels: you aren't just admiring or aspiring to something, but sort of onanistically identifying with your avatar.

That same believability gets particularly insidious in the context of video-game romance. It's one of those things that outsiders to the form can see a whole lot more clearly than those of us who play a lot of games: it is weird to have a lot of people throwing themselves at you and professing their undying love because you clicked a couple of buttons. They have no choice - they are just characters programmed to do so - but it can be tempting to think of this as an earned "conquest". The big risk, of course, is those sentiments bleeding over into the real world: believing that love is a game, that if you choose someone and select the right things that they will give you their affection, and if they don't then something is defective.

DDLC seems to take aim at the central conceit of having characters programmed to love you and blows it up. I think there are other potential solutions, though. While I've complained about this in the past, I increasingly like BioWare's approach to romance: not just restricted romance, where some characters have certain preferences which may exclude the player character, but also characters like Aveline and Harding, for whom you can express affection but who will not reciprocate. At the very least, this pops the illusion that everyone in the world has the hots for the player and that their lives revolve around him or her. In my own work, I've tried to double down on tension between the player character and the NPC to create the impression that they have free will: ultimately, of course, a fictional character doesn't have agency, but allowing them to veer off in other directions, express disapproval, or second-guess their choices can at least make this an illusion that love is something which is given, not won.

I'm still kind of mulling over what DDLC was saying. It feels like a somewhat nihilistic message, turning away from something artificial in our entertainment, as opposed to the Christine Love games, which are more about finding something valuable in our games and then bringing that back with us to the real world. But both get a lot of well-earned and well-crafted mileage by skating along the line between reality and fiction, between player and avatar, and leave you with plenty to think about.

END SPOILERS

I have a hard time recommending Doki Doki Literature Club. The subject matter will be offputting to a lot of people, and even people who really enjoy one aspect of it may end up disliking the other. But I do think it's one of the most well-crafted games I've played recently. It does very specific things to create tension, to heighten reactions, to draw out your emotions and induce whiplash. I've already found myself thinking about how techniques in this game might be adapted to hypothetical future projects of my own. DDLC can be a hard game to enjoy, but it's a very easy game to admire, and I think it has a ton to offer anyone who wants to provoke emotional responses in other people, as well as players who are interested in peering behind the curtain and exploring how experiences like this can work.

Zerøspace

I picked up My Zero Zero based on a very brief recommendation in one of the Life Is Strange fan communities. I'm glad that I didn't know much about it going in to the book, and the few things I'd heard were sufficient to sell me: that it had some similarities to the game, in particular the core relationship between the two leads.

MINI SPOILERS

I can definitely see quite a few parallels. For starters, both the game and the book tackle mental illness. Different forms of it (depression in LiS, bipolar disorder in MYZ), and it affects the characters and stories in different ways, but both do a great job of treating it seriously and humanizing the people suffering from the illness.

Some of the characters line up pretty cleanly as well. I didn't get much of a Max/Chloe vibe from Lauren, but I thought that Blake's dad seemed a lot like William. And Cyd really reminded me of Dana. Even if the individual characters didn't have clear parallels, the overall ethos felt very familiar: creative, artsy high-school-age girls navigating stressful relationships and their own futures. No supernatural time-travel here, but they don't really need it.

I did find the game rekindling my own memories of school, even more so than LiS. A small part of this was due to the setting, growing up in Minnesota... there isn't a whole lot of direct regional stuff, but the way characters talked definitely felt like how real (non-stereotypical) Minnesotans talk, down to details like saying "pop" (much of the Midwest says "soda", but Minnesotans are solidly poppers). And the dynamic of school/religious/family life and the odd intersections of it, while not a major part of this book, felt very familiar.

The transition from the outlying areas to the cities felt familiar as well. Duluth isn't a suburb, but also isn't densely urban. My family left Minnesota before I was old enough to spend much solo time in the Twin Cities, but I had similar experiences of urbanization: the sensation of being overwhelmed but also exhilarated was formative to my evolution from a suburbanite into an enthusiastic city-dweller. You have a very vague sense of "The Cities" when growing up, but can't really understand how day-to-day life feels there until you're living in it. Lauren is in the early stages of that transition, but you can see that the spark has been struck, and she clearly wants to spend the rest of her life living in the city.

I didn't particularly identify with any one of the characters, but I was really struck by a couple of elements of Blake. I had a hard time understanding her at first, in particular her obsession with infinities, where I had a hard time tracking what she was saying and what she meant. Then, after some reflection, I realized that the sensations she was describing felt exactly like how I felt about eternity when I was a kid: the sensation of drowning, of fear, of desire and hopelessness bound together. That's something I never really resolved, just kind of got used to ignoring, but re-reading Blake and Laurens' thoughts brought it back again, which was really cool. It also made me think about infinity and eternity in general... I've never really compared them before, but they're kind of the same concept, perhaps with infinity existing in the third dimension and eternity in the fourth. The idea of "orders of infinity" is fascinating as well, makes intuitive sense to me, and caused me to think about applying that concept to eternity.

I'll try to wrap up this thread of "Things In This Book Reminded Me Of Myself" with one last element, the collaborative story. I'd completely forgotten about it, but a similar project formed a major part of my junior high school years: an ongoing serialized comic that a few friends and I passed around, gradually developing a sprawling plot with its own mythology. We had similar senses of ownership over the characters in it, although in our case we also directly appeared in it as well. Like the version in this book, ours was a "Multiverse", and we explicitly shifted between various dimensions and realities as the story demanded. Anyways, seeing that pop up in the book made me wonder, how common is that sort of collaborative experience in school? I don't think I've seen another portrayal of it in fiction before, and I'd always thought of it as something unique and special that we did; but I also haven't ever really talked about it before, so maybe it's fairly common and just something that people discard / forget as juvenilia?

OK SO ENOUGH ABOUT ME BACK TO THE BOOK:

Uh, I really liked it! The central characters are vivid and compelling, the ancillary characters believable and interesting, and I felt super-engaged by the storyline. The actual writing is terrific as well. There are some really funny bits in there, terrific little phrases and observations and analogies. The story gets more serious as it continues, and the writing gracefully follows that arc, showing a lot of thoughtfulness and compassion for what the characters are going through.

It was really interesting to see a romance - heck, multiple romances - play out largely through the medium of instant messaging. I suppose that must be the norm now, but I don't think I've really encountered it in fiction before: I'm used to characters almost entirely advancing their relationship via meeting up in person and talking face-to-face, with perhaps the occasional 19th-century epistle for dramatic emphasis. Electronic communication really is significantly different, and I thought the book did a great job at capturing its unique rhythms and concerns. Seeing that someone is typing, and your stress level rising as you anticipate their reply. Seeing their status shift from "Online" to "Idle" and wondering what they're up to, trying to divine their physical situation from the terse digital status: did something come up? Are they avoiding the conversation? Digital communication is a form of connection, something we can draw solace and comfort from; but it's also something that's new, that we as a society haven't fully adapted to yet, and there are many other layers of uncertainty that get added when you remove non-verbal communication, facial cues, and the other elements that we're evolutionarily conditioned to use in navigating relationships. Anyways, I thought that Lauren's internal thought processes were really great at portraying how this type of connection does and does not work.

MEGA SPOILERS

This book is a romance, and also seems like a coming-of-age story, but with an interesting set of concerns. Coming-of-age books are often about the protagonist trying to determine their identity, what kind of person they want to be. In some ways, Lauren's identity is fixed before the book has even started: she realized years ago that she is a lesbian, and never wavers in her determination to get a girlfriend. Other aspects of her identity are immutable, like her Jewishness: she isn't especially enthusiastic about that, but it's an undeniable part of her. She can choose how she wants to interpret and respond to that part of her heritage, but she can't just decide to not be Jewish any more.

And then there are the parts of her identity where she knows what she wants (or doesn't want), but that are in tension. Most of this is driven by her father: will she be a dutiful daughter and wife like he wants, or a high-powered successful person like he is, or a creative person like she wants to be? She has a clear preference here, but it is a choice, and one that's very painful no matter what she chooses.

Part of becoming an adult is choosing, but another part is recognizing: discovering what kind of person you are. This is the plot element that probably comes up the latest, but it's very compelling, as Lauren reflects on her actions and her relations, trying to figure herself out. Is she cold? Is she a bad girlfriend? Is she trustworthy? These questions have a lot to do with interpretation, of self-reflection. You can sense Lauren growing much more mature as she wrestles with these aspects of her identity.

The major event that sets off this introspection is her breakup with Sierra. I was really impressed by how that plot evolved. On the one hand, the deterioration of her relationship with Sierra feels really abrupt and surprising: it seems like stuff is going so well, then Lauren gets together with Blake, and all of a sudden their love curdles. But, looking back over it, I think the author did a great job at setting this up: there are tons of little clues and signs all along that Sierra is bad news, Lauren is just too giddy and smitten to pick up on them. Stuff like how she's completely oblivious about and uncurious about Lauren't Jewish faith and her not-quite-kosher diet, for example: that doesn't make much of an impression at first, it's something you can just chalk up to Sierra being slightly spacey, but in eventually fits into a significant pattern of her narcissism.

Even though I, as a reader, was completely on Lauren's side throughout the tribulation, I thought her self-flagellation was very understandable... she didn't deserve any of her treatment, but of course someone in that situation would question herself and look to her own shortcomings in trying to make sense of everything that had happened.

I'm really glad that stuff worked out! It's interesting that the passionate connection came so early, and the book ends with a stronger focus on intimacy and commitment. I feel slightly concerned in the big picture for the two of them - while Lauren's dad is wrong about most stuff, he's right that it's difficult to make it in the world under those circumstances. But in the small picture, I'm so happy for the two of them, and I think these two not-quite-perfect people are perfect for each other.

END SPOILERS

Yeah... good book! While I hadn't intended it this way, it's also kind of whetting my appetite for the new Life Is Strange expansion that drops on Thursday. Much like LiS, I can see myself continuing to mull over this book and root for its characters long after finishing.

Travelin' Man

Some aspects of long plane rides are not fun, but I do appreciate having a huge, unbroken period of time with nothing better to do than read through a novel. Ordinarily it might have taken me weeks or longer to finish The Time Traveler's Wife, but instead, I read through almost its entire length during a San Francisco - Chicago flight. I think I still would have enjoyed it regardless, but having a shorter duration probably did help me stay on top of the pleasingly complex plot and track what what each of the characters knew and when they knew it.

MINI SPOILERS

The Time Traveler's Wife is based around a sci-fi conceit (time travel, natch), but it doesn't really read like a sci-fi book. It's much closer to a character study, or even a romance. Time travel isn't some amazing super power that lets people go on adventures; instead it's a frightening, uncontrollable, often painful malady that Henry, the protagonist, must endure. Time travel creates much of the tension in this book, and Henry and his eventual wife Clare work hard to limit its damage.

That said, I deeply appreciated just how thoughtfully the author approached the concept of time travel. It isn't some hand-wave-y plot device like what occasionally crops up in Star Trek or Superman. It follows very specific rules, which are explained early on and consistently adhered to throughout the book. Most theories of time travel either follow a multiverse model, where traveling through time essentially creates a new reality based on the changes you make out of time, or a universe model, where the time traveler is prevented from making changes to history. This book follows the latter model very closely, with some interesting wrinkles. The concept of time travel raises the uncomfortable problem of paradox: what happens if you travel back in time, and make some change that prevents you from being able to travel back in time from the future? In The Time Traveler's Wife (henceforth TTTW), Henry is constantly showing up in his own past, but it's fine since he's always shown up in his own past. In other words, when two versions of him meet himself, the older version will remember the meeting from the first time, and it will be new for the younger version.

In a few ways, this book kind of reminds me of the movie Primer, which remains the best time-travel movie I've ever seen. TTTW has more heart, and is more focused on relationships, but both offer very sensible thoughts about how time travel could work, and much of the pleasure of both works is figuring out a very complex puzzle that extends through time in interesting ways. Whenever you see a person, you need to figure out whether you're seeing someone who is existing in "prime" time, or if they are a traveler from another period in time. Unlike Primer, though, I think you end a first read of this book with a very clear understanding of how the pieces of the puzzle fit together.

While time travel is cool concept, it's not the most important part of this book. That would definitely be the relationship between Henry and Clare. It's a love story, but thanks to the time travel aspect, it's a very unique love story. In real time, Henry is 8 years older than Clare. They eventually get married when Henry is 30 and Clare is 22. After marriage, Henry travels back in time and meets Clare on multiple occasions while she's growing up. He first meets her when she's a little girl of six; this is the first time she's met him, and he knows everything about her: her family, her studies, her toys, her house. Over the years, he helps her with her schoolwork, listens to her talk about her friends, and watches her grow up to a young woman. Eventually she moves to Chicago where she meets him... but since she's 20 and he's 28, he hasn't yet met her, so he is meeting her for the first time. Their situations are now reversed: she knows a lot about him since she grew up with him, but he doesn't know anything about her.

That sort of thing is complicated, but also quite lovely. Every piece of it makes sense even if the situation as a whole seems impossible. The book directly addresses the questions of free will, causality, and determinism that are raised by Henry's excursions. Henry seems to have a pretty solid handle on it: things happen once, and they happen a certain way. You can't change anything, since whatever happens, has already happened. The characters don't spend too much time trying to fight this; out of curiosity they attempt once or twice to do something that would change the future, but the future always ends up happening anyways.

Incidentally: the idea of an adult man meeting a young girl for whom he will eventually have a romantic relationship might sound rather skeezy, but the author (who is female) really makes it work well. Henry has matured considerably by the time he meets Clare in the past, and is always very well behaved (while being very self-aware of the oddities of the situation). The book very forthrightly describes the physical aspects of their relationship, and it's impressive that it comes away as so heartwarming. I found myself thinking of the Ben Folds song "The Luckiest," which described a somewhat similar scenario of encountering your true love out of time.

I'm now realizing that I haven't even mentioned the supporting characters, which is a shame. Henry and Clare definitely form the core of the novel: the sections alternate in viewpoint from one to the other, with each taking turns narrating the story. Not as much time is given to the rest of the cast, but they're still really well-written, variable in personality and role, drawing out interesting aspects of the two leads and pursuing their own agendas at the same time. Several are sad: Henry's father, Clare's mother, and Ingrid all live pained and somewhat self-destructive lives. (Even then, though, one of the interesting aspects of the book's construction is that you can shift in time to see periods when they were happy. The book's emotional narrative arc need not follow its emotional chronological arc.) Many others are good friends, who might know about Henry's problems, and support the couple. It's interesting to see other peoples' reactions to time travel: generally they flat-out disbelieve him, but after seeing it in action (for example, being confronted with two versions of Henry), they update their view of what is possible, and become surprisingly nonchalant about the situation.

Most of the book is very uplifting. There are moments of tragedy throughout, though, and the book grows gradually darker as you approach the end. Again, thanks to the unusual construction of the book, the author can get away with some interesting narrative choices: Henry knows in advance what will happen, and so you as the reader know what is coming, which actually raises the tension and creates a palpable sense of dread that looms over the reader. (I'm somewhat reminded of the best Kurt Vonnegut novels, where he tells you in the first page or so how the book will end, and yet the story becomes even more gripping as you approach the inevitable conclusion. But here, there is no omniscient narrator "spoiling" things for us, but an actual character inside the text yet outside of time.) I was happy with the very very ending of the book, which kept it from being as bleak as it might otherwise have been. Again, with this sort of story, you could choose to end it at any point along the timeline, and I appreciated the last act of grace.

END SPOILERS

I realized as I read this book that I really don't read many romances. Obviously I won't ever read from the genre of the romance novel, but the novels I read typically don't even have that strong of a focus on romantic relationships. The most recent example I can think of is 1Q84, but even that was... well, there was very little exploration of romance, more of a single moment of intense kindness in childhood that radiated out through all realities to bind two souls together across being and un-being. Erm. Where was I? Oh, yeah... weirdly enough, I've probably spent much more time on romances in video games (Baldur's Gate 2, Dragon Age, Mass Effect trilogy) than reading romances in books. I enjoyed this one very much. The concept of the book let the author create something that has never happened, and can never happen, and yet allows her to deeply engage with the subject in a unique yet veracious manner.

Apparently a movie was made from this book. I've been warned against it, so I doubt I'll see it. I loved the images I got from the book, and will be happy keeping them unadorned in my head into the future.