Time travel book âThis Time Tomorrow' makes the millennial midlife crisis fun
The millennial midlife crisis has arrived.
Yes, while youâve been cracking jokes about avocado toast, the eldest millennials have quietly, and with great dread, entered their 40s. Given that they canât afford homes, never mind sports cars, whatâs a millennialâs midlife crisis look like? In Emma Straubâs winning new novel âThis Time Tomorrowâ (Riverhead, 320 pp., â â â ½ out of four, out now), it looks a little like the movies they grew up on, with a dash of time travel to spice up the existential dread.
Alice Sternâs father is dying. Thatâs tough on any daughter, but itâs hitting Alice particularly hard as she approaches a midlife crossroads: Sheâs about to turn 40, suspects sheâs going to be proposed to by a man she doesnât want to marry, and still canât decide whether she wants children despite a biological clock thatâs rapidly ticking down. She canât seem to definitively make up her mind about anything, and the one constant in her life, the single father who raised her with unwavering if imperfect love, is lying unresponsive in a hospital bed.
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âThere was supposed to be an upside to adulthood, wasnât there?â Alice muses. âThe period of your life that was your own, and not chosen for you by other people?â
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It doesnât help that sheâs still at the exclusive private Belvedere School where she spent her adolescence, working in admissions, where she decides which of her old classmatesâ kids make the cut. Aliceâs sense of arrested development gets thrown into overdrive when her unrequited teenage crush walks through her office door with a beautiful wife and young son in tow.
All those intense adolescent feelings come flooding back, complicated by remorse over paths not taken. Could this have been her life if sheâd told the cute boy with the lush Jordan Catalano hair how she felt?
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She gets a chance to find out when, after a night of drunken revelry on her 40th birthday that ends with her passing out in an empty guardhouse, she wakes up to find herself in her childhood bed in her fatherâs home, 16 years old again. The guardhouse, she discovers, is a time portal. On one side, itâs her 16th birthday, and on the other, her 40th, and the changes she makes to her past are reflected in her future. Itâs eerily similar to "Time Brothers,â the sci-fi novel about time-traveling brothers her father authored, that made her dad a popular staple at nerd conventions.
What would you change, if you could go back to 16? Would you sleep with your crush at your birthday party? Do drugs? Shave your head? Beg your father to quit smoking? Tell him you love him more?
Alice does it all, trying to engineer a happier future â one that doesnât include her father on his deathbed on her 40th birthday. With each trip back to 16, she gets a better understanding of her father, whoâd seemed so old when she was a kid but now seems so young.
âAlice and her father had always been such good friends,â Straub writes. âIt was luck, she knew, plain luck, that gave some families complementary personalities. So many people spent their lives wishing to be understood. All Alice wanted was more time.â
âThis Time Tomorrowâ is technically a time travel book, but not the way Aliceâs fatherâs book is. Straub is not so much concerned with time travel mechanics, the butterfly effect, or killing baby Hitler (or whatever the 1990s equivalent of that moral test would be). Straub is concerned with love â its different forms and expressions, how it evolves over time, and how we can be better at giving and accepting it.
Love, too, for her own father, horror novelist Peter Straub, whom she thanks in the acknowledgments "for receiving this book as it was intended, as a gift.â
Because even if you could go back and change everything else, the love would remain the same.
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