TOMORROW AT THIS TIME, By Emma Straub
If you could travel 24 hours back to 1996, how would you spend that time? Would you run around in panic, grabbing people by the lapel and trying to warn them of the coming global heat wave, a fiction-based news complex, and a virus that would steal taste, smell, and too many lives? Or would you drink in the sight of your loved ones in a bygone era – your older parents, their youth and vitality restored, or perhaps your grown children, little creatures again waddling towards you, arms outstretched forever?
Alice, the time-traveling heroine of Emma Straub’s sixth novel, “This Time Tomorrow,” never really thinks about variations on the first option. This book, perhaps intended for posterity or the general public, ignores all the stressful signifiers of the modern age, beyond Alice’s momentary frantic search for her iPhone.
In her 2014 novel ‘The Vacationers’, Straub takes the reader on an escapist fantasy involving a flawed family vacationing in Mallorca; in ‘This Time Tomorrow’ the escapist fantasy is about the recurring reunions of two relatives in the 90s, that stupid sweetheart of a decade, when everyone, if they were worried at all, was probably worrying about the wrong things. Even if the premise of “This Time Tomorrow” is a flight from realism, the scope of Alice’s concerns is human-scale and plausible: She can’t help but wonder what she could have done differently at seemingly crucial moments in the past. to give a happier gift to herself and the people she loves most. And while her travels through time allow her to rethink her romantic history, the person whose past she most wants to rectify is her father, a man whose impending mortality deepens the novel’s nostalgia into something urgent and poignant.
The novel opens with Alice on the verge of turning 40, an adrift woman, largely tied to her childhood, so much so that she works at the same private school she once attended as a girl. Her father, Leonard, the creator of a blockbuster pop culture phenomenon about time travel (bestselling book, long-running television series), is in his 70s and fading fast.