This Time Tomorrow
By Emma Straub
Riverhead Books, 320 pages
★★★
If you like time travel books, This Time Tomorrow has intriguing moments. Alice Stern had a happy childhood, even though her mother left the family early on. Alice was raised by her father, Leonard, whose children's book, Time Brothers, was made into a TV show so successful that he never had to write again. He sent Alice to a competitive New York City private school, indulged her, adored her friends, and treated her as an equal. (He even calls her “Al-pal.”) Their life at Pomander Walk–a real-life Manhattan cooperative apartment complex–was part salon and part extended childhood.
Now 40, Alice has a relatively new boyfriend and is an administrator at Belvedere, the progressive school she attended. She worries that she's being pushed aside for promotion, is depressed that her father’s impending death, and is freaked out from an admissions interview with the child of Tommy Joffey, a guy after whom she lusted when she was younger. To top it off, her lifelong best friend “Sam” (Samantha) is moving to New Jersey with her younger husband and their three children. Sam assures Alice they'll continue to meet just like old times but... New Jersey… Holland Tunnel?!!
Then time shifts. Author Emma Straub tells Alice's story in six parts. Part One is the present, but in Part Two she's celebrating her 16th birthday, Leonard is vibrant, and Sam is by her side. Alice isn't sure how she got there. She left the hospital, drank too much, couldn’t find her keys, and fell asleep in the Pomander Walk guard tower. She awakes, the year was 1992, but she knows that she's from the future. Try convincing your BFF of that; yet oddly she does. She and Sam attend Comic-Con where she picks her father’s brain about time travel. Strangely, he too believes her story.
Unlike novels such as The Time Traveler's Wife, Alice seldom finds herself in grandiose situations; more like perplexing ones. All Alice can discern is that her time travels seem to be connected to her birthday, her father, and Pomander Walk. Straub enlivens the novel by dropping in time travel references such as her father's Time Brothers book and movies like Back to the Future and Peggy Sue Got Married. Alice’s small shifts, though, make This Time Tomorrow more akin to Groundhog Day than to a dramatic tale such Time and Again. In Alice’s mind, she has never done anything unexpected and “was just floating. Like a seahorse.”
Each time she shifts back to the present–2016 in her case–her father is still dying. But in Part Three, it’s 2006 and she is married to Tommy. He is apparently a big shot of some sort, but instead of the three children he had with Ursula in 2016, he has two with Alice: Leo and Dorothy. (A sly Wizard of Oz reference?) This time she’s at Pomander Walk celebrating her 30th birthday, Leonard has a second book, a new wife, and Alice visits a psychic.
Part Four is a series of time jumps attached to life decisions such as whether she should quit her job. Perhaps, though, she's figured something out. Although each jump has a new set of externals, she begins to wonder if the purpose of the birthday shifts is to keep her father alive: “Leonard is immortal, if only for the day.” Imagine what Sigmund Freud could do with a line like that!
In Part Five, she’s 40 again, but a different 40. By this point in the book, Alice is feeling lost and perhaps we, the readers, can relate. I’ll leave it to you to decide if Part Six is satisfying. From one perspective it makes sense in terms of novel logic; in another, it strays deeply into pop psychology territory. I will say that after a while it feels as if Straub has overplayed metaphors of emptiness, regret, and being frozen in time.
It is, however, the kind of book that invites the description “charming.” It’s also fun to flash back with her to see what things appear in one time period and disappear in another. A dominant message is that time is precious, and who can argue with that? For the record, she’s the daughter of writer Peter Straub, whose work delved heavily into the supernatural. Like father, like daughter. On a sadder note, Peter died four months after Emma’s This Time Tomorrow was published. Now that’s creepy.
Rob Weir
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