A Time-Traveling Daughter Just Wants Some Time With Her Dad
Newly single, professionally idling, Alice wakes up the morning after her 40th birthday to find (does it really matter how?) that she has been restored to her childhood bed on her 16th birthday. Overhearing the sound of her once-again-young father preparing for the day in the adjacent bathroom, she is reminded of all the memories so lost to time that we don’t even know to miss them: “Alice listened to her father brush and rinse and spit and knock his toothbrush against the lip of the sink before settling it back into its glass cup with a jangle as it knocked against hers. It had been so long since she’d thought about those sounds — the coffee grinder, the slippered shuffle down the hall.”
The novel is shot through with aching “Our Town” celebrations of the mundane, but its most explicit affiliations are with genre and pop culture. In a few instances, familiar character types, or narrative tropes — a dopey boyfriend who feels pressured to propose, a wise and comforting psychic — show up like old friends in a creased photo, two-dimensional but worth holding onto. “This Time Tomorrow”’s characters talk about mass-appeal science fiction as a way of trying to make sense of what has happened to Alice: Is she having a “Peggy Sue Got Married” experience, but with a horror-film twist? Is it like “Back to the Future,” but without the fear that she’ll never find her way back to the present?
Even as it rifles through references, “This Time Tomorrow” insists on its own originality — just as Alice gets to go back and relive her own 16th birthday several ways, the novel experimentally cycles through a few forms of narrative, playing on reader expectations. When Alice is restored to the present (does it really matter how?), the novel momentarily indulges the reader in a self-consciously fairy-tale ending, complete with clothing porn — only to reject that story line altogether. That kind of happy ending will not do; Alice will try out various others before landing just as gently in a less obvious place.
For anyone who lived in New York in 1996, the book provides sweet snippets of lost memories and associations. Alice recalls her friends lying on the grass in Central Park “waiting for J.F.K. Jr. to accidentally hit them with a Frisbee” and the pleasures of a fresh bagel from H&H, “steam rising off the dough, too hot to hold with her bare hands.” But its most complex and specific evocations are reserved for the relationship between an amiable, if slightly checked-out, single father and his city-kid daughter, a girl expected to be the solid one in the relationship. What she wants out of time travel is not so much to fix herself, but to unstick her father, who has stalled out romantically and creatively. For her father, storytelling will prove the path forward; for Alice, it’s a way to see the richness of the path itself.
“Any story could be a comedy or tragedy, depending on where you ended it,” Alice notes. “That was the magic; how the same story could be told an infinite number of ways.”
