I recently started reading National BestSeller "The Time Traveler's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger (OK, so I'm a little late to the party...). I am up to page 280 -- specifically, right at the section break that follows their marriage (newsflash: they get married -- so not a spoiler, even for the characters). But I'm afraid I don't get it; that is, I don't feel compelled to read the second half of the book. On its own, this feeling is by no means unusual. I'm a big proponent of not finishing books that do not, of their own force, demand to be finished. There is too little life to spend any of it on dull prose. This time, though, I'm wondering if I'm missing something because it seems like everyone and their great-aunt adored this book. I did a quick search for reviews and turned up almost exclusively positive pieces (in addition to this interesting blogpost by someone who compares the covers of different editions), which actually surprised me a bit.

Part of the problem is the -- perhaps inherent -- lack of suspense: in every scene, at least one of the characters seems to know what will happen. And the usual source of tension in romantic fiction -- the petal-pulling see-sawing she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not -- is entirely absent. At least in the first half of the book, there is no doubt ever that the two main characters are in love and always will be. Although there are hints that their married life is not hitch-free, those hints do not amount to actual dramatic tension. And the scenes that I suspect are supposed to generate a little thrill of danger -- when Clare's little sister reveals that Henry looks like a naked intruder from her childhood, or when Henry disappears during the wedding -- unfold without any actual sense of risk or danger, leaving me wondering what is really at stake for these characters.

The other problem is the voicing. The novel is recounted alternately by Henry (whose age varies in non-linear fashion) and Clare, at times as if the two are in dialogue. The narrative voice, however, never changes. Sometimes I have to look to the start of a section to remember who is speaking. This seems like a major flaw -- why use different narrators if they all sound the same?

I do find somewhat poignant the way that time's passage is used to comment on the shapes and colors of romantic love. When Henry meets Clare for his first time, she already knows him (and knows she will marry him), which is a nice metaphor for getting at the feeling of instant familiarity or sudden intimacy that many people experience when falling in love (sample sentence: " 'I can reach into him and touch time...he loves me. We're married because...we're part of each other...' I falter. 'It's happened already. All at once.' "). Maybe it would be better to read the whole book as an extended reflection on the way that couples in love are always circling back to and immersing themselves in their memories of one another, so that those memories do not remain in the past but are interleaved throughout one's experience of the present and the future. And then there's the way that the time travel intersects with ideas about gender, for example that Clare is the gentle feminine force who will help coax the man she desires out of the boy she has -- not necessarily an idea that makes me want to jump up and down, but certainly a powerful social theme.

But all of that is not enough to propel me on to page 281.

So, readers, tell me -- what is it that I'm failing to see?

Lay awake this morning (Tuesday)

Listening to the pigeons fuck on the fire escape or wherever it is on the other side of the window they rendez-vous --

I've never actually seen them but once in High School Petra told me that was the sound they made,

The sound I heard this morning through the windows and the rain-soaked light and the butter colored curtains.

This is the week before I start work

The morning after the night we went to walk around Bernal Hill in the wind

Whipping so hard it knocked words out from between our teeth

And several years after I began to try and fail to write a poem called "Darwin's Pigeons"

A poem to explain what exactly was so special about those birds

That he saw within their "carunculated skin" and "elongated eyelids," their "enormously developed" crops and "short conical" beaks,

The very mechanism of life

Saw them the way we would all like to be seen

In time, in series, in slow circles elaborating a single dropped rock

Their very features evidence that even

The gestures we do not intend have meaning.

Consider This

From footnote #13 in a 2006 article by Mark Danner on the ongoing war in Iraq: "The current rate of killing of one hundred Iraqis a day would be the equivalent, adjusting for population, of 1,100 Americans a day, or 33,000 dead a month. (In the decade-long Vietnam War, about 58,000 Americans died.)"

Still Life with Sound

One of my favorite modern composers, Knut Nystedt, wrote the piece "Immortal Bach." It is a Bach chorale, sung once straight, and then the second time around in several parts all at different tempos and all radically decelerated. What I love about this piece is that it takes the quintessence -- the paradigmatic example -- of a phrase, a moving line, a living arch of sound and breaks it into a series of unmoving vistas. It's like watching a movie by taking the film out of the canister and looking at each individual frame, one by one, like witnessing the settle and seep of paint on a canvas.

The novel about the Russian spies caught in 2010 in Montclair, New Jersey, would open in the same way as practically every article about them: with a glossy still of life in a leafy suburb. The first chapter would be short, its lacquered narrative remarkable only for the impenetrability of its slick shell -- until the last paragraph of the last page when the finest fragment of the truth about what was going on would start to emerge. The back story -- how the spies were selected, hired, trained, relocated -- would unfold over the next few chapters by means of the stock exposition devices (writing in a journal, reminiscing to oneself, unjustified flashback, recounting a story to a small child, reliving the past with a friend) so by the middle of the book, the reader's knowledge would be current.

And then the second half of the book would mine the most fascinating territory in the realm of the spy novel: how do you hold onto an internal sense of who you are when it is at odds with your conduct? How do you prevent yourself from relating to or identifying with the culture that surrounds you? As the Telegraph reported after the fact, "Moscow appeared concerned that the Murphys might be embracing suburban life a little too enthusiastically. In 2009, there was a dispute over who should own their Montclair house, with the Murphys protesting that owning it was 'convenient' and a 'natural progression of our prolonged stay here' and should not be seen as any 'deviation from the original purpose of our mission.'" It is hard to argue with the idea that if you are trying to infiltrate American culture in any meaningful way, fully engaging with the ever-present trope of home ownership is a must. Consider this statement from a response piece by a NY Times editor who nearly bought the house next door to the Murphys: "We almost talked ourselves into it, but a subsequent visit convinced us that the house just wasn’t the one. We wanted a fourth bedroom for guests, the sloped backyard wasn’t fit for play and a tiny detail about the dining room that proved the last straw: the china cabinet wouldn’t fit. . . . Instead, we bought a bigger house nearby." Just who is putting on whom?

Instead of presenting the final scenes directly -- the dramatic entrance of the FBI into the dreamy neighborhood, the carefully staged hand-off on the Vienna air strip -- the last chapter would consist entirely of reaction shots. It would have to open with a string of headlines, perhaps even a full article excerpted from a local newspaper, followed by scenes of the neighbors coming together to discuss what had happened and make sense of it. Again from the Telegraph, "Mr. Fonkalsrud said: 'I'd rather have Russian spies as neighbours than a paedophile. The Murphys were true suburbanites. They seemed to genuinely love their kids and I think they probably enjoyed their American life here.'" Mr. Fonkalsrud's voice here is that of the liberal humanist, reminding us that even spies have families and the need for community and the innate god-given ability to enjoy soccer games and barbecues and deck chairs.

I guess that last sentence reveals the tension at the heart of my own view of the situation -- would my novel end on the tone of Thomas Friedman's op-ed? (Sample sentence: "Everything the Russians should want from us — the true source of our strength — doesn’t require a sleeper cell to penetrate. All it requires is a tourist guide to Washington, D.C., which you can buy for under $10.") Or would it be more like American Beauty? Would it be a celebration of American consumerist culture as infinitely irresistible? Or a satire of that culture's perpetual slide toward self-celebration?

In the last chapter, the narrative voice from the beginning would return, smooth and serene, but would likely seem sinister after such a systematic undermining of the possibility of serenity. It would be hard to fight the urge to lay the ground for a sequel, or at least to suggest that nothing is ever as it seems, but fight that urge I would because I don't think that's the moral of this story at all.

There would probably be a coda about the family's return to Russia -- brief and grim, a bluish gray departure from the golds and greens of the earlier chapters, it would contain only the barest suggestion of the many worlds that lie beyond our own.