A review by curlymango
Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates

1.5

Admittedly I don’t read much, but I’ve never read a novel so unbearable in my life. I feel deceived by a somewhat interesting premise only to be faced with 300 bleak, agonizing pages of self pity and faux philosophizing for no discernible purpose. Our two main characters each had about as much depth as a Petri dish.

He’s a “star hacker” and she’s a blank sheet of printer paper.

So Mary Ellen is Joyce Carol and Adriane is Joyce’s subversive alter ego who is so so smart for a questioning authority a single time. Gold star, Adriane/Mary Anne, for having such progressive thoughts like “colonization bad” and “maybe racial segregation is not good.” The logic for sending her to COLLEGE IN 1959 is so obviously just to relive her sorry first year in college. I know she went through a lot of trauma in her life, but Joyce, there’s literally no reason a fascist regime would want a young American to go to AN AMERICAN COLLEGE IN 1959 if they wanted to brainwash her! If you want to write another memoir, just write another memoir! The Sci-fi parts of the book are derivative and only made me think of better things I could be spending my time reading. I think I rolled my eyes after every single chapter. And don’t get me started on the mother loving punctuation in this. After about the TEN THOUSANDTH parenthesis and the TEN THOUSANDTH em dash I wanted to bash my head into a wall. Each one was like a mini hurdle for my eyeballs except the race just kept going on and on and on. I finally got to the finish line aka the acknowledgements page and surprise surprise, there’s one line thanking one editor. And guess what? It still reads like a manuscript with that absolute jungle gym of parentheses. I at least want the 3 minutes back that I spent rereading to check for what seems to be a continuity error. 

The only reason this doesn’t get 1 star from me is the chapter Lonely Girl II, when Adriane/Mary Ellen watches Rear Window and remarks:

And this time too, though it was billed as a suspense film, the film moved with excruciating slowness. The actors were so obviously acting. The film was so obviously a film […] it was impossible to take them seriously as anything other than glamorous movie stars going through the paces of an improbable story, again to heavy-handed background music that made me so restless, I had to press my fingers against my ears.

I mean, it so perfectly sums up how I felt reading Hazards of Time Travel. So perfectly meta whether intentional or not. But it doesn’t justify all the other trash I had to sit through.

Anyways, I don’t feel bad being so mean because JCO has gotten her accolades and my review isn’t gonna do anything to her success. Now I’m finally free to enjoy a good book and hopefully ease the hypertension that this one has left me with.