THIS TIME TOMORROW, By Emma Straub
If you could travel back to 1996 for 24 hours, how would you spend that time? Would you run around, frantic, grabbing people by the lapels, trying to warn them about the coming global heat wave, a fiction-based news complex and a virus that would steal taste, smell and too many lives? Or would you drink in the sight of your loved ones in an earlier era — your older parents, their youth and vitality restored, or maybe your adult children, once again tiny creatures toddling toward you, arms forever outstretched?
Alice, the time-traveling heroine of Emma Straub’s sixth novel, “This Time Tomorrow,” never really contemplates any variations on the first option. This book, perhaps intended for posterity or a wide audience, passes over any stressful signifiers of the modern day, beyond Alice’s momentary frantic search for her iPhone.
In her 2014 novel, “The Vacationers,” Straub takes the reader on an escapist fantasy with a flawed family that goes on holiday in Mallorca; in “This Time Tomorrow,” the escapist fantasy entails two family members’ recurring reunions in the ’90s, that dumb sweetheart of a decade, when everyone, if they worried at all, was probably worrying about the wrong things. Even if the premise of “This Time Tomorrow” is a flight from realism, the scope of Alice’s concerns is human-scale and plausible: She can’t help wondering what she might have done differently in seemingly pivotal past moments to yield a happier present for herself and the people she loves the most. And although her travels through time allow her to reconsider her romantic history, the person whose past she is most eager to set right is her father, a man whose imminent mortality deepens the novel’s ambient nostalgia into something pressing and poignant.
The novel starts with Alice on the brink of turning 40, a woman adrift, tethered mostly to her childhood, so much so that she works in admissions at the same private school she once attended as a girl. Her father, Leonard, the creator of a blockbuster pop culture phenomenon about time travel (best-selling book, long-running television series), is in his 70s and fading fast.
Newly single, professionally idling, Alice wakes up the morning after her 40th birthday to find (does it really matter how?) that she has been restored to her childhood bed on her 16th birthday. Overhearing the sound of her once-again-young father preparing for the day in the adjacent bathroom, she is reminded of all the memories so lost to time that we don’t even know to miss them: “Alice listened to her father brush and rinse and spit and knock his toothbrush against the lip of the sink before settling it back into its glass cup with a jangle as it knocked against hers. It had been so long since she’d thought about those sounds — the coffee grinder, the slippered shuffle down the hall.”
The novel is shot through with aching “Our Town” celebrations of the mundane, but its most explicit affiliations are with genre and pop culture. In a few instances, familiar character types, or narrative tropes — a dopey boyfriend who feels pressured to propose, a wise and comforting psychic — show up like old friends in a creased photo, two-dimensional but worth holding onto. “This Time Tomorrow”’s characters talk about mass-appeal science fiction as a way of trying to make sense of what has happened to Alice: Is she having a “Peggy Sue Got Married” experience, but with a horror-film twist? Is it like “Back to the Future,” but without the fear that she’ll never find her way back to the present?
Even as it rifles through references, “This Time Tomorrow” insists on its own originality — just as Alice gets to go back and relive her own 16th birthday several ways, the novel experimentally cycles through a few forms of narrative, playing on reader expectations. When Alice is restored to the present (does it really matter how?), the novel momentarily indulges the reader in a self-consciously fairy-tale ending, complete with clothing porn — only to reject that story line altogether. That kind of happy ending will not do; Alice will try out various others before landing just as gently in a less obvious place.
For anyone who lived in New York in 1996, the book provides sweet snippets of lost memories and associations. Alice recalls her friends lying on the grass in Central Park “waiting for J.F.K. Jr. to accidentally hit them with a Frisbee” and the pleasures of a fresh bagel from H&H, “steam rising off the dough, too hot to hold with her bare hands.” But its most complex and specific evocations are reserved for the relationship between an amiable, if slightly checked-out, single father and his city-kid daughter, a girl expected to be the solid one in the relationship. What she wants out of time travel is not so much to fix herself, but to unstick her father, who has stalled out romantically and creatively. For her father, storytelling will prove the path forward; for Alice, it’s a way to see the richness of the path itself.
“Any story could be a comedy or tragedy, depending on where you ended it,” Alice notes. “That was the magic; how the same story could be told an infinite number of ways.”
Susan Dominus joined The Times as a Metro columnist in 2007. She has been a staff writer with The Times Magazine since 2011.
THIS TIME TOMORROW, by Emma Straub | 320 pp. | Riverhead | $28
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