The Lost Time Accidents, by John Wray

This 2016 novel is a mashup of ideas from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Sirens of Titan and Slaughterhouse Five), Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow), and P.D. Ouspensky (A New Model of the Universe). Wray probes Time, and the possibilities of time travel and what that might mean to the power-hungry, through the lives of a singular family.

The Lost Time Accidents are the grail pursued by the offspring of Ottokar Gottfried Toula, a Czech gherkin-maker with a hobbyist's interest in time. In 1903 he discovers something about its nature, writes a few cryptic sentences, and is hit by a car and dies before he can explain further. His sons, Kaspar and Waldemar, move to Vienna and study physics. Their work coincides with publication of the Theory of General Relativity; the family feels Einstein has trespassed on their understanding of time, and ever after, they refer to him only as the Patent Clerk. Contempt for him feeds Waldemar's anti-Semitism.

Kaspar and Waldemar part on chilly terms as students: Kaspar marries the daughter of his Jewish professor, and Waldemar decamps to Czechoslovakia where privation begins his transformation into the monster he will become, the Nazis' Black Timekeeper of Czas, performing unspeakable experiments on Jewish subjects in a camp where he has complete autonomy. Kaspar and Sonja and their twin daughters leave Vienna as Nazism descends. Sonja dies en route to America, and Kaspar takes the girls to Buffalo where he joins a watchmaking company. He marries again eventually, and his son Orson, raised primarily by the twins, becomes a prolific author of pornographic sci-fi, his output reminiscent of Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout. These twins, Enzian and Gentian, function as an isolated dyad, Enzian the theorist and Gentian the practical one; they decamp to a building in Harlem where they can pursue their experiments, Enzian thinking and studying and working on time travel devices while Gentian becomes a local character, enjoying city life on her shopping expeditions.

Orson finally writes a real novel, a thinly-disguised account of his eccentric family and their preoccupation with time, which because it is published in 1969, becomes a runaway bestseller. The Revelations-like final section spurs formation of a cult, the U.S. Church of Synchronology (UCS), derisively dubbed the Fuzzy Fruits by Orson. He marries a student boarding at his house, and they have a son, named Waldemar by Enzian and Gentian. This young man is the narrator of this tale, and it falls to him to find the solution to his great-grandfather's Lost Time Accidents, and to discover how his namesake disappeared when the prison camp he ran was liberated by the Soviets. The story is told, in alternating sections, as a family history and a series of letters - confessions might be a better word - to his clandestine lover, the wife of the founder of the UCS.

If all that sounds convoluted, it is. To Wray's credit, he dodges the main pitfall of time travel stories: altering the past which alters the present. And he's a witty and vivid writer:
"The Xanthia T. Lasdun Memorial Ocean-View Manor & Garden was a thirty-six-chambered assisted-living facility in Bensonhurst, with that bleary, nicotine-stained shabbiness every neo-Tudor building in the world seems to exude. Its garden, as far as I could determine, was the condom-festooned median of lower Bay Parkway, and its ocean was the droning, alluvial parkway itself."
But Wray does enough name-dropping (Sonja models for Gustav Klimt, and Kaspar sits in on a discussion between Wittgenstein and another luminary) to remind me of people who've done past-life regressions and concluded they were Cleopatra, Napoleon, Michelangelo - never anyone ordinary.

In a mystery, which this story is in essence, it's important that the resolution be worth the effort it takes to get there. Well, not for me. Maybe Mr. Wray should read some more Ouspensky, or study Vonnegut's storytelling art. Vonnegut, you see, doesn't do suspense. He'll tell you in the moment of introducing someone, how and when that character dies, or accomplishes something or fails to. This frees him from the burden of coming up with a blockbuster climax, and allows the reader to focus on other aspects of the story. Not a bad strategy, when you don't have a breakthrough vision.

Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler is a guilty pleasure for me - her books are such easy reads that surely something's wrong with them. I started some years ago - the first I really remember is Ladder of Years, about a woman who walks away from her family during a trip to the beach, goes to the next town, and sets herself up: a rented room, a job, a routine. From that distance she communicates with her bewildered husband and children. I liked it because what mom hasn't enjoyed the fantasy of just leaving, pulling the rug from beneath her family's expectations of her? Imagine the family car suddenly having a mind of its own, and instead of schlepping on errands, taking off for parts unknown just for the change.

Then I read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and began to know Tyler's milieu - the eccentric (which means off-center) characters who bumble through life trying to be fair, trying to understand a world that fails them, trying to reconcile their own histories with who they think they should be.

Tonight I finished Digging to America, a rumination on what America is, what makes a person American, and the nature of outsiders. Two Korean baby girls arrive on the same flight to Baltimore's airport, each met by her adoptive family. Because the Americans are loud and inclusive, they pull the Iranians into association which becomes friendship. The two extended families are full of ideas about each other, assigning cultural attributes based on peeping through this window onto others' lives. They're often comical, sometimes offensive (and offended), but as their lives intertwine they become just people, close in the way family members are: a source of irritation, but like a grove of bamboo, connected underground.

Tyler's a best-selling author, which suggests that eccentricity is a refuge for many readers: a place to contemplate and make peace with our own oddities, and to come away more tolerant of others' foibles. Much light fiction is escapist: science fiction, spy stories, steampunk, vampires, a school for wizards, mysteries in which we can read at a happy distance about someone else's fatal problems. But she writes another kind of novel: reflective, in which rather than forgetting our own lives in favor of those more glamorous and dangerous, we find the poetry and humor in ourselves. And appreciate ourselves more, as she exalts failings by showing the humanity and compassion that precipitate them. Her characters may not be swashbucklers, but by their own measure they dare, and sometimes succeed. And she is kind: the highest achievement in her books is the growth and recognition of love.

If I were teaching high school English, she'd be on my reading list. Her characters don't outgrow oddity, they learn to flourish within it - surely that would be a comfort to a fifteen-year-old who's pretty sure no one understands.