At the start of this novel we meet Karl, who’s a 40-year-old single dude who owns a bar in Chicago. He used to be the guitarist for an indie rock band that was kind of big in the late ’90s, but now he just has his bar, and his best guy friend, Wayne. Until he accidentally discovers he also, apparently, has a wormhole in his apartment: he’s searching for one of his boots in his closet one day and suddenly finds himself sucked through the floor and then in the past, a few months back. He lands at a nearby rock club, at a show he’d actually seen, and then finds himself back in the present. He tells Wayne, who writes a program that lets them send themselves/other people to specific places/times in the past, and they launch a business in which they send people back to see particular bands/shows/performances, by request. But then Wayne wants to go to 1980 and prevent John Lennon from being killed, which Karl is not OK with: fucking with the past seems like a bad idea and a slippery slope. Heated words are exchanged, but Karl agrees to send Wayne back—but then accidentally sends him to 980, rather than 1980.
The rules around time travel in this book felt like a lot of hand-waving, which kind of bugged me at first, but eventually I was OK with just suspending disbelief (Wayne can send texts and emails from the past? Yeah, OK. I actually think there might sort of be an explanation for this at the end of the book, but in the midst of things it felt a bit weird.)
So anyway: Wayne is in 980, and Karl doesn’t know how to get him back, because the normal procedure relies on ambient electricity in the past from which the person is traveling. Wayne tells him to find an expert, which leads Karl to meet Lena, who’s in the PhD program for astrophysics at Northwestern. He tells her about the wormhole; she thinks he’s nuts; he shows her; they time travel together; they start dating. Together and separately, they travel into the past and/or future and try not to mess things up too badly. The book ends up being a time-travel story and a love story and a story about figuring out what you want, what you would keep the same about your life and what you would change if you could.
I wanted to like this book more than I did, which isn’t to say it was bad—and maybe part of my problem with it was a lack of momentum on my part (I started reading it on an airplane, then didn’t read at all over the course of a mini-vacation in Oregon, and then picked it up in earnest again after arriving home). I found the beginning fairly fun, the middle sort of slow-going, and the build-up to the end pretty great—which may have been as much about where I was, reading-wise, as about the book’s pacing, I don’t know.
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