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Summary
Summary
An ingenious, dystopian novel of one young woman's resistance against the constraints of an oppressive society, from the inventive imagination of Joyce Carol Oates
"Time travel" -- and its hazards--are made literal in this astonishing new novel in which a recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America -- "Wainscotia, Wisconsin"--that existed eighty years before. Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town she is set upon a course of "rehabilitation"--but cannot resist falling in love with a fellow exile and questioning the constrains of the Wainscotia world with results that are both devastating and liberating.
Arresting and visionary, Hazards of Time Travel is both a novel of harrowing discovery and an exquisitely wrought love story that may be Joyce Carol Oates's most unexpected novel so far.
Author Notes
Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16, 1938 in Lockport, New York. She received a bachelor's degree in English from Syracuse University and a master's degree in English from the University of Wisconsin.
She is the author of numerous novels and collections of short stories. Her works include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, Bellefleur, You Must Remember This, Because It Is Bitter, Because It Is My Heart, Solstice, Marya : A Life, and Give Me Your Heart. She has received numerous awards including the National Book Award for Them, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature. She was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with her title Lovely, Dark, Deep. She also wrote a series of suspense novels under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith. In 2015, her novel The Accursed became listed as a bestseller on the iBooks chart.
She worked as a professor of English at the University of Windsor, before becoming the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She and her late husband Raymond J. Smith operated a small press and published a literary magazine, The Ontario Review.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
In this audacious thought experiment about the shrinking of human potential, a rebellious teen is sent back to the 50s Time travel stories are seldom really about time or travel, and Joyce Carol Oates's 46th novel is no exception. Audacious, chilling and darkly playful, her thought experiment about belonging and otherness is quick to ignite, but admirably slow to reveal the full extent of its dystopian proposition. The action begins in a queasily familiar near-future America where "democracy" is administered by an acronym-loving bureaucracy appointed by the Patriot Party, the only political show in town. Citizens are graded by ST (Skin Tone), and schoolchildren must memorise Science Facts such as "cancer is caused by negative thoughts" and "the average female IQ is 7.55 points lower than the average male IQ". But in a society that mistrusts its citizens, high IQs are a liability regardless of gender - as the precocious teenager Adriane Stohl discovers when her high school valedictorian address leads to charges of Treason Speech and Questioning an Authority. Sentenced to four years of "rehabilitation" in Exile, she is whisked back in time by means of a microchip implant and teleportation to awake like a reverse Rip van Winkle in 1959 Wisconsin. The brave new/old world of twinsets, cumbersome Remington typewriters and the cold war could not be more different from the one that has banished her. Or could it Anyone writing speculative fiction today runs the risk of their nightmare scenario becoming yesterday's news before the book is published - which may account for Adriane's skippy, breathless first-person narration; her dashes, exclamation marks and broken sentences give the novel a slapdash quality. But its imaginative ambition, intellectual panache and propulsive story offer plenty of compensation. Awkwardly reincarnated as Mary Ellen Enright, a freshman at the fictional University of Wainscotia, Adriane gets painfully hair-rollered by well-meaning room mates, learns the word "girdle", rediscovers handwriting and attends classes on BF Skinner, whose pronouncement that "a self is simply a device for representing a functionally unified system of responses" serves as the book's sly epigram. Unable to forge friendships and suffering from the chronic stress of her double status as outsider and impostor, Adriane/Mary Ellen falls gauchely and hard for the charismatic psychology professor Ira Wolfman. Is the expert on learned helplessness a secret fellow Exile from the future, as she suspects, or something else Is she trapped in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Plath's The Bell Jar, the Wachowskis' The Matrix, or Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror Or is she just a human rat in a "Skinner Box", doomed to press the same buttons and levers repeatedly in an effort to "make sense of the stimuli, to perceive a pattern amid randomness" Most crucially, can she ever return to her past life in the future - and should she Oates takes bleak relish in keeping the reader guessing, while deftly interrogating the novel's central preoccupation: the voluntary shrinking of the human mind. The Nordic term Janteloven, coined by the Danish-Norwegian writer Aksel Sandemose in 1933 to satirise the mentality of small-town Denmark, enshrines a pervasive, crowd-generated totalitarianism that forbids anyone to seem, think they are, or actually be better than anybody else. Under Sandemose's rules, extraordinariness, ambition and self-belief are deemed crimes against society, and as a result, pervasive self-censorship and militant mediocrity prevail. Since the brilliant Oates, like the brilliant Adriane, went to university in Wisconsin, one of several midwestern states where Scandinavians settled, it's hard not to wonder how much retrospective personal rage fuels her exposé of America's version of Janteloven. Tall poppy syndrome is a child of collective envy, the novel suggests; and wherever tall poppies grow, there will be crowds wielding scythes. Whether the syndrome manifests as a survival mechanism in a future America where it's "better to be a safe coward than a sorry hero", or as the unrecognised cornerstone of intellectually stunted 1950s academia, Oates's message is clear: any society that punishes exceptionalism in the name of egalitarianism is a dystopian one. In positing the real "hazard" of otherness as exposure to the crushing contempt of a conformist majority, she is highlighting not so much the banality of evil as the evil of banality. As time-travelling, universally applicable propositions go, mediocre it is not. - Liz Jensen.
New York Review of Books Review
INCREASINGLY I WONDER whether Joyce Carol Oates is attempting to become Margaret Atwood. Her 40-odd novels, traced over the past 50-odd years, mark an increasing tendency toward dystopia. She is most famous for what one might call novels of small-scale violence, in which individuals might get bloodied (or kidnapped, or sacrificially killed, or implicated in a murder-suicide) but societies usually get off scot-free. Now she has written a thriller in which the murder victim is America. The violence of Oates's world is excessive, but then again it looks much like our own. Like other prolific authors, Oates has always plucked characters and plot-points from the real world: Jeffrey Dahmer, JonBenet Ramsey, Marilyn Monroe. Oates has a tendency to broadcast the threats that are fashionable, not necessarily the ones most likely to befall us. She makes distorted photocopies of the American psyche: biker gangs, psychotic mothers, amnesiacs, cults, sexual abuse, race riots, serial killers, strippers who are also serial killers. So if the country in "Hazards of Time Travel" looks a lot like Gilead, that may be the fault of America and not Atwood. The novel opens with a self-explicating monologue. "Sometimes on my knees in a posture of prayer I am able to break through the 'censor barrier' - to remember," the protagonist, Adriane, begins. "But my brain hurts so!" Adriane calls herself an Exile, as quickly explained immediately after: The Exiled Individual (El) is limited by the Homeland Security Exile Disciplinary Bureau to a 10-mile radius around an assigned residence. A flood of definitions follows. We are told that Mexico and Canada have been "reconstituted," the United States Constitution replaced by "Patriot Vigilance." Oates has always said that her primary interest is in personality. A writer like Atwood takes great joy in world-building, but for Oates it's a chore to be dispensed with. And so the Cliffs Notes-like introduction is a frantic scrabble to get back into charted territory. We meet Adriane's humble father, forced out of his medical residency for "listening sympathetically" to a political speech; her weasly brother, Roderick, stuck in a menial job at the Media Dissemination Bureau (MDB); and Adriane herself, first selected valedictorian and then arrested before graduation. "How ironic it was," Adriane exclaims. "I'd been, for those few cruel days, valedictorian of my high school class!" After the arrest, she is sent back in time, renamed Mary Ellen and exiled to a college "in the North-Midwest States that now encompass what was known as 'Wisconsin.'" It's the late 1950s; the other girls at Wainscotia State are aghast that Adriane doesn't wear rollers in her hair at night. And she is terrified by their girdles and cigarettes. "Is this my punishment?" Adriane wonders. "Secondary smoke inhalation." Oh, the hazards of time travel! The novel's underdescribed future, with its hints at totalitarian politics, doesn't play to Oates's strengths as a nostalgia artist, her ability to abruptly evoke a bygone era with a teenager's pink plastic hairbrush, a mother's black net gloves. At her best, her worlds, however violent, feel lovingly considered. The futuristic one in "Hazards of Time Travel" feels hastily made. Wisconsin in the 1950s gives Oates more to work with: a tartan skirt pinned with a bronze clip, a bomb shelter filled with Rice Krispies and fruit cocktail. These objects are carefully chosen. They have more psychological nuance than Oates's people. Adriane and her classmates all share the same earnest, shuttered quality and indistinguishable voice. More fundamentally, they're all manifestations of Joyce Carol Oates: excitable Victorians, fascinated by conformity and fear. Adriane attends classes taught by a B. E Skinner collaborator interested in "curing antisocial behavior," and falls in love with his assistant, who she suspects is an El himself. "But how ironic," Adriane exclaims, "an Exiled Individual recruited to cure antisocial behavior!" "If this novel ... had been published before 2016," Oates tweeted in January, it "would seem like dystopian future/sci-fi." But the world she imagines is rigorously believable, its every twist underlined and circled. Oates evokes a future made from the ingredients of the present: televisions and internet access, cellphones and broken government. She doesn't try to stretch the limits of what we know, or what we might become. That's a task for an Atwood, perhaps. JAMIE FISHER has recently completed a novel set in postwar Italy.
