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?