There is a small dark room inside the Art Institute of Chicago: sixteen wooden columns, four illuminated Japanese screens, one bench. Clare DeTamble has been going there almost daily for three years because it is the only place in the city where she can weep without being observed. She is not waiting for anything. Her husband is dead and will stay dead, and Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger finds her in a room designed for contemplation, doing nothing at all in it.
That bench is where Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger actually begins, whatever the chapter headings say. A stranger sits down at the far end of it. Neither of them speaks. They will be married in four years.
The Widow Is the Real Subject
The publicity will sell this as the return of the time traveller, and the daughter, Alba, does inherit her father’s condition along with his eyebrows and his bony hands. But the engine of Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger is Clare, and what Clare is doing is the least science-fictional activity imaginable: she is failing to move on. Her studio is unchanged. Henry’s suits still hang in the closet six years after his death. She keeps making the same paper sculptures she made before, and she can tell they are dead, and she cannot stop.
Rebecka Charles is the woman on the bench, a Quaker coder from Detroit with a MacArthur, a collapsing marriage and a virtual museum full of things that no longer exist. Their courtship occupies most of the second quarter of the book and it is the warmest writing here. A first dinner at a red-carpeted Russian restaurant is interrupted when a naked, filthy, grey-streaked woman in her late thirties comes tumbling through the revolving door and turns out to be Clare’s eight-year-old daughter. Clare hands over her coat, her shoes and forty dollars, and sends her home in a cab. Beck, to her credit, orders more borscht.
Clare’s own art gives Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger its finest image. She builds a murmuration: a thousand mechanical starlings on wires in a blacked-out garage, wheeling around a viewer who stands in the middle of them. She explains that she wanted to take her blackness and put it somewhere other people could see it. Beck, who is Black, points out the problem with the phrasing, and Clare goes scarlet, and the two of them kiss about ninety seconds later. The scene does more work on grief, race and artistic failure in three pages than most novels manage in three hundred.
Life Out of Order Is a Book of Deathbeds
Count them. A violin teacher dies of a stroke on his sofa while his granddaughter, arrived from thirty years in the future, holds his hand and permits him to mistake her for his dead wife. A ninety-five-year-old Korean neighbour dies in a cardiac ward with a man who has been dead for eight years sitting beside her in a wheelchair, wearing a bathrobe he stole from another patient. A piano teacher dies in a freezing London front room while her former student improvises something she has never heard, because it is the only thing left he can give her. A woman dies in her sleep in a lake house after an evening of wine and old pop songs, and her wife wakes and puts a hand to her cheek and finds her only slightly cool.
Niffenegger is very, very good at this. She understands that dying is mostly logistics interrupted by unbearable moments: who is fetching the blanket, whether the nurse will let you stay, how strange it is to eat a dead man’s blueberry muffins the morning after. Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger keeps returning to a line from a William Penn prayer, read aloud at one of those bedsides, about death being only a horizon and a horizon being nothing except the limit of our sight. The book means it literally. Time travel here is not adventure. It is a device that lets somebody go back and sit with the dying a second time.
The Pianist Who Had Never Touched a Piano
Alba’s second husband, Oliver, arrives late and steals the middle third. His backstory is the most economical and most affecting material in the book: a boy of thirteen sent alone from Shanghai to London in 2041 on a forged Royal Academy application, because his poet parents are heading back to prison and this is the only exit they can buy. He has no musical training whatsoever. He has six months and a teacher named Madeline Baxter, who smokes throughout every lesson, who sits him down and has him press random white keys while she answers on the black ones, and who becomes the parent he loses.
His marriage to Alba is the plot’s hard problem and its weakest limb. It runs backwards through the twentieth century, first kisses in the wrong order, a wedding at Chicago City Hall in 1981 in a red suit their future selves left out for them. Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger wants this arrangement to read as inevitable rather than as adultery, and it mostly gets away with it because Oliver is so plainly lonely. Zach, the husband who is not a traveller, is the one who pays. He spends four decades not asking, and then forty years writing the manuscript that turns out to be this novel: two hundred and twelve notebooks, which he calls a love letter, because in his view marriage is a gift of yourself.
Four Things Life Out of Order Cannot Fix
It restarts too often. Four parts, each rewinding to a different decade and a different narrator. Momentum built in one section is regularly spent lighting the fuse on the next.
Alba is a locked door. Her refusals drive the plot, and the novel keeps insisting she physically cannot speak certain sentences. Read once, it is eerie. Read four hundred pages later, it is a device.
The apocalypse is narrated, not staged. Almost everything about the drowned, birdless 2090s reaches the reader through one character describing it to another over coffee.
The betrayal resolves absurdly fast. After ten years of concealment, the injured party is talked round in a handful of pages and a couple of gin and tonics.
None of this sinks the novel, but it does explain why Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger reads considerably longer than its page count. There is also the matter of what the book asks readers to sit with quietly: an attempted suicide rendered in full detail, an adult’s approach to a boy of thirteen conveyed almost entirely by implication, and an affair with a seventeen-year-old that the prose treats as tenderness.
Readers coming to Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger from Klara and the Sun will find the same question asked from the parent’s side rather than the machine’s, since Beck’s artificial daughter is explicitly a replacement for a baby who died. The Candy House by Jennifer Egan covers the neighbouring territory, a technology that stores consciousness and the people who refuse it, with more formal daring and less warmth. And The Time Traveler’s Wife remains necessary reading first, not for the mechanics but because the payoff of Clare’s whole life arrives in one late chapter and lands only for those who did the waiting with her.
What It Leaves Behind
Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger runs baggy, indulgent and roughly a hundred pages longer than its structure can carry. It is also the work of a novelist who has spent twenty-three years thinking about what a person owes the dead, and who has decided the answer is presence: turn up, hold the hand, read aloud from the prayer book, stay until it is over.
The last chapter puts a ninety-one-year-old man in a rowboat above a submerged London, eating tinned beans, asking his younger self to row him out to sea. He has a packet of biscuits and no regrets worth mentioning. It should be unbearable. It is oddly, stubbornly cheerful, which is the trick this novel pulls again and again: everyone here is saying goodbye, and almost nobody is afraid.