Every Anxious Wave by Mo Daviau
My rating: 3/5 cats
this is a book with an irresistible hook: High Fidelity with time travel.
that is the perfect opportunity for a joyful, if flimsy, romp full of pop culture references and fanboy/girl gushing and a little romance slapped on top because a book’s gotta have one of those.*
and it started out that way.
it’s got that same kind of bittersweet nostalgia as High Fidelity:
Wayne and I shared that common affliction plaguing single men with limited prospects and self-destructive tendencies: we regarded our pasts with such love and loss that every day forward was a butter knife to the gut. Our twenties had been full of rock music and courage. The future made us older, but our wisdom was dubious. Wayne and I avoided the pain of tomorrow with alcohol and old rock bands. Pavement on the jukebox, the heavenly reddish glow of neon signs, and sentences that started with “Remember when…”
heavy on the get-off-my-lawn old(er)-man bitter:
A pack of talentless teenagers who played covers of Liz Phair songs like they meant nothing …
and then lo! on PAGE TWO karl discovers that there is a time-traveling wormhole in the floor of his bedroom that permits passage back in time. and he rents it out to others for $$, with very specific rules: the wormhole can only be used to visit concerts from the past, no souvenirs, no photos or audio recordings, no interactions of any kind, no leaving the venue, and no staying longer than the duration of the concert.
and despite all the “jeeez, mom” rules, this concept is fun, fun stuff – this is like first date icebreaking conversation starters – what concert would you go to if you could?
even though there’s only one answer: oingo boingo farewell tour halloween 1995
and now we are on a date.
and of course – time travel is complicated and mistakes are made, and karl’s data entry typo sends his best only friend wayne back to 980 manhattan, where the lack of technology problematizes wayne’s return journey and requires the recruitment of an astrophysicist who is coincidentally also a passionate music-lover and also karl’s type. apparently.
all of these things – the farfetched premise, the reliance on coincidences, the fast pace at the expense of explanation – all of these set up an expectation for the kind of book this should have been: frothy, escapist, nothing you have to think or feel too hard about, a bit of rock and roll fun with silly pretty meaningless lines like:
Lena moved her foot over to mine, to hold it. We were holding feet like cautious lovers in a storybook about secrets.
and it is indeed popcorn-lit for a while, but then it goes a bit dark; darker than the premise would suggest, but not dark in a way that i found enjoyable. the writing wasn’t strong enough to support the tonal switch – you need to earn your darkness, or it can be alienating to the reader who has become caught up in this light fantasy until now. the characters aren’t developed enough to pull off a story with any depth – they still think they are back in that rock and roll time travel book they auditioned for.
on the subject of characters – i found both karl and lena to be profoundly unlikeable and they seemed so ill-suited to one another, i never understood if i was meant to be rooting for them to get together or for them to realize they had no chemistry. i never understood their insistence on being together – she’s mercurial, he’s gormless, there’s no sparks flying anywhere. he’s like a burr that’s attached to her just cuz she walked by and she’s always trying to shake him off. the synopsis sez this book will address “how to hold on to love across time,” but these two can’t even hold on to love across a chapter. also, his only consistent criterion for romantic attraction seems to be “damage” which is usually a sinister quality in a man.
this book glosses too much. which is fine in the kind of book i thought it was at the start. a “we’re just having fun here!” book can get away with a freewheeling nose-thumb at details like
how does time travel work??
“it just does, wheeeeee!!”
why are they in a relationship with each other?
“they just are, wheeeeee!!!”
but once you start introducing things like rape, body image, infant mortality, etc – you’re not a wheeeeee!! book anymore and serious books require a little more effort. don’t get me wrong – i am absolutely fine with there being no explanation for time travel. if time travel existed and you tried to explain the “how” to me, i guarantee i would not understand it. but i would kinda like to know what these characters see in each other. to be fair, this same question is addressed in the book, but it’s waaaayyy at the end, which is too little too late for a book positioning itself as a music geeky romance and you have to just roll with it for a long time before the question is even asked. and never, i would venture, satisfactorily answered.
i’m grateful to have won this through firstreads, and for a debut it’s got a lot going for it, but there’s some shaky first-timer bits that’ll probably all be tidied away by book #2. it’s a medium-three.
*i mean, inasmuch as High Fidelity is a “joyful romp,” focusing as it does on a bitter and sad man who uses music as an insulating barrier between himself and the world and can’t maintain relationships but probably gets the girl in the end anyway. (i only saw the movie and i don’t remember the ending, but i’m guessing that’s what happens because who would turn down john cusack, right?)
