The Lost Time Accidents
John Wray
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Dh73
Readers thinking of John Wray's 2009 novel Lowboy, smiling to remember its lean grace, its chipped-away, almost poetic economy of expression, will find an entirely different experience in the author's new book, The Lost Time Accidents, and not only because it's twice as long as its predecessor.
The main difference is one of tone, of amplitude. When the Nazis enter Vienna, for instance, Wray spares no detail: “Teenagers flung confetti; couples kissed in the street; men sang ardently along with songs they didn’t know the words to yet; and everywhere that stiff-armed, armpit-exposing, supremely unsavoury salute. In terms of pure spectacle, that tremendous parade was unsurpassed in the city’s three thousand-year history: a whirling laterna magica of jet black and scarlet, submission and patriotism, sweating men and fawning women, eros and repression, brotherly feeling and hate.”
In other words, The Lost Time Accidents is a full-dress symphony rather than the nervy violin solo that preceded it.
It’s the story of a man named Waldemar Tolliver, who is descended from a long line of eccentrics obsessed with time, ever since Tolliver’s great-grandfather Ottokar first stumbled across “the lost time accidents” while he was living in the unassuming Czech town of Znojmo (“a pretty imperial backwater, prosperous and unpretentious, known for its views of the Dyje River, its pickling mills, and not a thing besides”).
As Waldemar tries to explain to one dismissive acquaintance, his family has been trying to make sense of this obscure temporal theory for a century: “‘The last hundred years, do you understand me? People have wasted entire lifespans trying to extract meaning from it. Crimes have been committed … All to answer this one riddle.’”
In the “era of chaos and confusion and nearly limitless possibility” that was turn-of-the-century Vienna (“a kind of panicked conceptual gold rush”), Ottokar is suddenly struck by a totally revolutionary theory of time – and very shortly afterwards struck by a car and killed before he can fully explain his conceptual breakthrough to anybody, even himself.
The family obsession is eventually passed on to Waldemar’s namesake great-uncle, his dotty-inventor father, and his reclusive aunts, who live in a decrepit Spanish Harlem apartment in New York crammed with more than 15 tonnes of hoarded newspapers.
Through the younger Waldemar’s narration, Wray indulges in lengthy, atmospheric set-pieces from the last century of science, from the groundbreaking theoretical discoveries of Einstein (who’s dismissively scorned by Ottokar’s family) to the more problematic applications of Oppenheimer to the, shall we say less probable, time travel noodlings of Waldemar’s aunts, whose labyrinthine brownstone apartment seems for a time to hold the answers to mystery of the Lost Time Accidents.
The whole while, Waldemar is trying haplessly to have some kind of normal life, to escape this strange family legacy of time-obsession, which, in Wray’s subtle handling, all but equates to escaping time itself.
“The past is a torment to you,” he’s told, “the present is grim, and the future – from what I can see – scares you out of your wits.”
Considering the toll the “chronoverse” has taken on his very sanity, it’s small wonder Waldemar is often aggrieved by it, wailing to one character, “I want the past to be past: to stop spinning in circles, to stop sucking me in, to let me make my own goddamn decisions.”
It's a testament to Wray's narrative skill that The Lost Time Accidents can be so different from his earlier work and yet never feel less heartfelt; that it can be so conceptually bizarre and yet so emotionally powerful.
This is a novel full of big ideas ("What if the Universe is, as other men of science have conjectured, spread out across TIME as well as Space?" a character asks. "What if the partial view we have … is the effect of a mentally-imposed barrier, one that functions only while we are awake?"), but it echoes Lowboy by also being full of fragile, striving human beings.
It’s an uncanny blend of science fiction, theoretical physics, historical drama, and what may well be the oddest coming-of-age story we see this year. And if it gains Wray the wider audience he deserves, well, you’ll forgive the phrase, but: it’s about time.
Steve Donoghue is managing editor of Open Letters Monthly and a regular contributor to The Review.