By Joyce Carol Oates; Ecco, November 2018
While doing research for this review, I came across an old article from The Guardian about Joyce Carol Oates that said “nearly every review of an Oates book, it seems, begins with a list” of the veritable mountain of work the writer has amassed in her over 40-year career. The reason this quote stood out for me was, in viewing Oates’ work, I realized I have never read a single thing she has written until now. I was, therefore, in a position when reading Oates’ latest novel, Hazards of Time Travel, to come at it with a fresh point of view—and no list to compare to. I would love to say, like I did with author Jane Yolen, that reading Oates’ novel opened the door to an author whose books I can’t wait to devour. Unfortunately, that was not the case.
Hazards of Time Travel reads like a jumbled, rambling dystopian YA novel written as a frustrated reaction to Trump-era politics. The protagonist, Adriane Strohl, is a teenager who is arrested for “Treason-Speech and Questioning of Authority”; both offenses in the future North American States that are punishable by either “deletion”—where you are not only vaporized (which is exactly what it sounds like), but also means your family and friends are “forbidden to speak of you or in any way remember you, once you cease to exist”—or “exiled,” in which a person is given a new identity and teletransported to another location to be re-educated and become a value to society. In Adriane’s case, the sentence is exile; the location: Wainscotia Falls, Wis.…in 1959.
The story is told mostly from Adriane’s point of view, which is regrettable, because Oates’ depiction of a disoriented, terrified teenage girl, falling in what she thinks is love with an older authority figure in a similar situation, is almost too spot-on in its awkward desperation. Combined with the confusion of her circumstances—Is Adriane really in the past, or just a virtual reality of it? Or is this all a dream? Are any of the other, undeveloped characters spies for the government? Are they even real? Is she being watched, or has she simply been dumped in the past? – Hazard never gives you anyone to root for, or even a coherent story to latch onto. You can tell that the intent was a commentary on the inevitable evolution of the current political climate, but what has been presented instead is a bewildering mishmash of a story that ends up going nowhere; a meta concept, but obviously unintentional. If this was a new author, I would say “don’t quit your day job; for Oates, it’s “better luck next time.”
