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Book Review: Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger

Today is the publication date for Life Out of Order, Audrey Niffenegger’s sequel to her 2003 novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife. I gave a blurb to Life Out of Order, but after reading it a while back, I sat down and wrote a full-length review because I wanted to say more about it. So here ya go!

I read The Time Traveler's Wife so long ago that it remains in my mind as a series of impressions more than an actual book — I remember adoring it, but the details are faint. And in the twenty-three years since it was published, The Time Traveler's Wife has spawned two adaptations and a whole host of imitators. It's become the canonical example, perhaps the first major example, of the "two people meeting out of order" trope. Steven Moffat mined this idea for multiple Doctor Who storylines, before he finally got the chance to adapt the book himself.

Now Niffenegger has published a quasi-sequel called Life Out of Order, which I greatly prefer to the first book. It stars Alba, the daughter of Henry, the protagonist from the first book. Alba is also a time traveler, and she spins her own complex web of temporal comings and goings — at various points, there are three or four Albas, from different time periods, hanging out together. Alba has slightly more control over her time traveling than her father, and she also thankfully seems to have fewer nasty incidents when she appears in the past or future stark naked. (In part because she figures out some workarounds to allow her to access some stashed clothing in any time period.)

Life Out of Order is a much stranger, more sprawling book than I remember The Time Traveler's Wife being. Instead of one romance, there are several, and they intersect in fascinating ways. But also, Niffenegger has pulled the focus back, creating a story that's much more political and concerned with the wider world. There are anarchists fighting fascists and coping with police brutality and pervasive surveillance. The COVID pandemic is mentioned constantly. There's a major trans character, who is lovely and wonderful. It's a more challenging book than TTW in many ways, and feels very much like a product of the 2020s.

The word that kept coming to mind as I read Life Out of Order is "humanist," or perhaps "humane." This is a book that treats its characters with immense tenderness and care, while still showing how they deal with all the disasters and problems that arise through their lives.

Dystopia is at the heart of Life Out of Order. There's the rise of authoritarianism, which Niffenegger does not see being thwarted in the coming decades, but which still must be fought — and is fought, by most of the book's protagonists. And then there's climate change, which she depicts unstintingly, in bleak terms that most climate fiction tends to shy away from. Coffee, fruit and other staples vanish by the 2040s, and by the end of the 21st century in her future history, there's basically nothing left. Humanity is dying off, cities are flooded and abandoned, and a few survivors hold on by their fingernails.

Oh, and a major running subplot in the book has to do with A.I., with Niffenegger trying to imagine a more pro-social version of the technology, created mostly by a Black woman trying to replace her lost daughter. 

I'm not attempting to summarize the plot of Life Out of Order, partly to avoid spoilers but mostly because it's much too complicated and sprawling, and I won't do it justice. 

So yeah, if you come to Life Out of Order expecting another tidy romance, you'll be surprised — but I feel like this is a vastly better book than The Time Traveler's Wife, and a much more challenging, interesting one. In some ways, Life Out of Order splits neatly into two halves, with the second half getting much weirder and more unruly, as Niffenegger unspools her grand storyline involving a love triangle, a nascent A.I., and characters attempting to grapple with the future.

The approach to time travel is also much more complex this time around, and Niffenegger seems to have given a lot more thought to the nature of time travel. Alba keeps insisting that she can't change the past, but it's more accurate to say that she can't change any events that she's aware of — and she does meddle constantly in her own and other people's lives, nudging people onto one path or another and occasionally making dramatic interventions in the timeline. There are "causal loops," where Alba semi-accidentally causes something that will affect her own life, but for the most part the time travel gives her a great deal of agency. 

Time travel is always a bit of a metaphor for our real-life tendency to mourn the past and fixate on the future, and Niffenegger's version has a poignancy that gave me goosebumps at times — and, toward the end of this book, made me cry a lot. There's a moment in the middle where Alba is talking to her child self, and she says:

Listen to me. Things are changing... you'll see things in the future that you won't understand. Try not to be afraid. Nothing will hurt you. You'll walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and fear no evil. You'll skim through time, you will have to keep secrets; sometimes you'll make mistakes. You are here to bear witness. People will love you, and you'll love them; sometimes that gets confusing. You'll do your best. You'll be fine, I promise.

Alba talking to her child self, or to other adult versions of herself, becomes a motif in this book in much the same way that her father used to meet his wife as a child. Alba talking to Alba packs a real emotional punch, and it spoke to the part of me that wishes I could speak to my past (or future) selves. There's so much I wish I could say.

A secondary, huge, theme in Life Out of Order is why we create art, and whether it's even worth creating art in a world that is doomed to suffer so much needless destruction and chaos at the hands of greedy oligarchs and authoritarians, and the climate disasters they are unleashing. Is it worth writing even if you have no audience, or even if your books will be lost forever? This is something I imagine a lot of us struggle with, and Niffenegger gently nudges the reader toward seeing the intrinsic value of meaningful beauty — or meaningful ugliness — by unfurling the inner lives of her artist characters. The A.I. project I mentioned earlier is in part an attempt to preserve lost people, places and artworks, but even if art only exists for a moment in time, that moment is still in some sense permanent.

Life Out of Order is not an easy book, and it's grappling with some heavy issues. But it is a tender book, one which believes in love and creativity and our own ability to take our tattered pasts and dubious futures and fashion something meaningful — for ourselves and others — out of them. At this moment in history, particularly, I'm very grateful to have read it.