June 6, 2022
This Time Tomorrow, by Emma Straub
Is novelist Emma Straub overhyped, I wondered, as I pre-ordered her latest novel This Time Tomorrow? And if indeed this is the case, am I part of the problem, pre-ordering her latest novel when the truth is her previous book didn’t really blow me away? I was a big fan of The Vacationers many years ago, and I’ve enjoyed her releases well enough since, but I was kind of resigned to This Time Tomorrow being something of a let-down, as are too many buzzed-about new releases. But oh, I’m so glad I didn’t miss this one, because it’s one of the best books I’ve read so far this year.
Though it matters, I think, that I’m something of a time travel fiend. Tom’s Midnight Garden, Charlotte Sometimes, and A Handful of Time are some of my favourite novels from childhood, and Straub’s references to movies like Back to the Future and Peggy Sue Got Married were absolutely delectable to encounter. It matters too that this is a time travel novel wholly self-aware of its genre and its place in the canon. In this case, it’s personal—protagonist Alice Stern’s father is author of the iconic novel Time Brothers, a time travel cult classic.
When the novel begins, Alice’s father Leonard is dying, silent and still in his hospital bed. Alice herself is on the eve of her 40th birthday, still living in the New York City she grew up in, still working in the same Manhattan private school she’d been a student at. She likes her life well enough, but her father’s condition and her milestone birthday are inspiring her to take stock and wonder how they got there and what else could have been
The novel features amazing Russian Doll vibes—after visiting a bar called Matryoshka, Alice wakes up in her teenage body, and proceeds to relive her birthday again and again, each time returning to the present to find her life very different due to choices she’d made. And while being trapped in a time loop might seem like a problem, to Alice it’s an opportunity to spend time with the father whose humanness and availability she’d always taken for granted when she was young. As one does.
What I love about this book is that almost none of the story was taken up by Alice trying to hide her situation from those around her. No, like any reasonable human, Alice takes advantage of her best friend’s intelligence and her father’s expertise in the area to loop them in and ask for help, so that the story becomes one about bigger questions, about the connections between generations, about the choices we make, and why they matter (or don’t!), plus a wonderful exercise in ’90s nostalgia.
It was smart, warm, and so delightful.
