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 … 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.
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In the future, dissidents get sent back to the past to be punished and retrained. Adriane–a compelling character– is sentenced to attend a mediocre midwestern college in 1960s Wisconsin. I enjoyed this time hop into the recent past and Oats writes about the time period with authority. This book is a psychological thriller with prose that glides you across the page. I only wish it had more joyful sex.
On the surface, this is a Dystopian romance novel. A young girl ripped from her family and banished. Long descriptions of her thoughts. All of this is window dressing. It’s a very detailed painting of a young woman’s mind, but this is the veneer over the story of a world where America has become the worst of what is currently looming, where great lengths are gone to to keep tight control of minds, thoughts, actions – where fear is the ruling emotion, powered by nearly suffocating insecurity and uncertainty. What is real? What is not? Even the parts of this book where a distracted reader might see happiness are horrifying in their deeper truths. A chilling novel of totalitarianism, mind control, and human emotion.
Thought provoking look forward and backward in time. A scary connection between our past and our possible future.
I really enjoyed reading this Oates novel, even though I feel she tries on genres and builds up great stories only to toss in the hat the last few chapters in a lot of her works. I was prepared for her abrupt ending style however, and enjoyed this novel immensely. This is an interesting take on totalitarianism with a nice bit of speculative thrown in
I was really interested in this book, but I found the ending spectacularly disappointing–twice. I forgot I had read it and then saw that I actually had and had given it a poor rating. It started out so interestingly, I thought perhaps my poor rating was because I hadn’t finished it. So, I re-read it, and it turned out I had finished it the first time. Both times I was sorely disappointed in the ending.
Halfway through the book I really missed the time travel shenanigans. There were so many restrictions put on the protagonist like she can’t use any of her knowledge from the future or she does not know anything about the past due to the school system, that we can’t feel any need for the time travel. She could have just went to another country where the customs were different. So I don’t think the promise of the book in the title was adequately addressed. The writing was superb throughout.
I lost interest about half way through. This isn’t a time travel novel in the expected sense; that is, once the main character is teletransported from a dystopian future back to 1959, the focus shifts to other questions, largely psychological. Aside from the fact that I agree that behaviorism was an absurd, dehumanizing theory, the main character’s constant weepiness made the last half of the book tedious and uninteresting. I skimmed the last half because I wanted to know how it would end, but the ending is still inconclusive. Lots of unanswered questions. I was very disappointed in this book.
Normally I really like her books but this one was weird and I was left at the end still not knowing what was going on.
Original story line from my perspective. Entertaining but had to slog through some areas.
Dystopian like “The Handmaid’s Tale”. A repressive future is neatly contrasted with a haunting portrait of late-1950s campus life in rural America. XLNT.
Wish I had the time back that it took me to read.