Audrey Niffenegger

AUDREY NIFFENEGGER

Although she doesn't have a TV, Audrey Niffenegger owns a stuffed groundhog, a chicken, a baby alligator, a rat, a mongoose wrapped in a cobra plus several skeletons and skulls of the animal and human varieties. The taxidermy-collector is also a lifelong punk-rock fan with a fixation on oddities like mummies, circus freaks and fire-breathers. A creator of unusual paintings, prints and photographs, her most recent visual novel featured 1200 hand-painted pages, took 14 years to complete and had a print run of under 20 copies; its title is The Three Incestuous Sisters. Her interests may veer towards the obscure, quirky and morbid, yet Niffenegger no longer enjoys anonymity. On the contrary, she's inadvertently hit the mainstream in the best possible way with her debut (non-visual) novel, The Time Traveler's Wife. It's a New York Times bestseller, a Today Show book club pick and Amazon.com's selection for Best Book of 2003; most unexpectedly of all, it's also attracted Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, who'd like to produce and star in the film adaptation. When the budding author's agent told her of the Hollywood couple's interest, "we both just laughed and laughed because we thought this was ridiculous," she told The Independent.

All this hype from such conventional quarters belies the truly unique quality of The Time Traveler's Wife, which blends science fiction, fantasy and romance into a fascinating, genre-defying and genuinely touching achievement. Precisely as the title suggests, protagonist Clare Abshire lives a normal life in linear, forward-time-progressive fashion. Trouble is, her beloved husband, Henry De Tamble, a librarian at Chicago's famous Newberry Library, suffers from Chrono-Impairment Disorder--a condition which subjects him to random, uncontrollable jumps backward and forward in time. Yet Henry doesn't ever walk among the dinosaurs or glimpse a moon-colony future. More modest in scope yet just as chaotic, his temporal shifts are limited to the span of Clare's life, as he sees his wife in childhood, near death and points in between. Since Henry's age is just as erratic as the era he's visiting, the couple is frequently unsynchronized--adding layers of complex challenges to their relationship. Somehow, their love endures and deepens throughout this confusing volley of time--leading to the birth of a daughter similarly gifted/cursed--but these star-crossed lovers are far from sentimental.

As USA Today raves, "Niffenegger, despite her moving, razor-edge prose, doesn't claim to be a romantic. She writes with the unflinching yet detached clarity of a war correspondent standing at the sidelines of an unfolding battle. She possesses a historian's eye for contextual detail."

Though an avid reader of Henry James, Edgar Allen Poe and Anne Rice, Niffenegger derived inspiration for her debut from a personal, not literary, source. She was dumped. "Some part of me had given up on the idea that any romance was ever going to work out," she told The Independent. "And some part of me was just like, 'OK, fine . . . I'll just write one."

"The book itself is about the marriage," she continued. "Henry is not only married to Clare; he's also married to time." Paradoxically, his disorder grants him omniscient access and insight into the entirety of his soul mate's life--a linear life he ultimately can't share with her.