2018 read #15: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki.

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
421 pages
Published 2013
Read from August 5 to September 10
Rating: 4 out of 5

A brilliant novel of heartbreaking immediacy and intensity, A Tale for the Time Being stumbles somewhat at the end, losing its emotional resonance in a morass of corny pop science.

Ozeki explores a plethora of fascinating themes: the tandem act of creation between author and reader; memory and time; Zen Buddhism and the transience of being; guilt and heroism; the cruelty of human beings in war as well as in junior high. A vaguely climatepunk atmosphere of living on the edge of things hangs over the chapters from the viewpoint of Ruth, a middle-aged writer who has lost her voice in the woodsy silence of the Pacific Rim. Far more moving are the chapters told from the perspective of Nao, a cynical and suicidal schoolgirl in Japan who writes the memoir of her "last days on earth" with a voice of brittle forced cheer. The two are joined by Ruth's discovery of Nao's book, mysteriously washed up on the beach with a bundle of letters, a diary written in French, and a kamikaze pilot's vintage watch.

The narrative is delightfully rich and complex, moving across time and perspectives from World War II to the aftermath of the Tōhoku tsunami. Ruth's chapters could verge on the self-indulgent, as authorial self-inserts usually do, but Nao's pained navigation of cultural dislocation, bullying, exploitation, and multiple generations of suicidal ideation was stunning in its affective power.

Like far too many literary authors, however, Ozeki was not content to let the mysteries of her tale remain shrouded in the fog of time, and dredged up one of the hokiest, most over-used clichés of science-fiction to "explain" what never needed to be explained. I'm talking about quantum mechanics and the many-worlds hypothesis. I remember getting one of my short stories rejected by a magazine in 1999, when I was 16 years old, because quantum mechanics and many-worlds were such hoary old-hat—fourteen years before the publication of Time Being. Perhaps like her namesake in this novel, Ruth became unmoored in her current reality and fetched up in an alternate universe where quantum multiplicity isn't the corniest plot device in the world. The ending thus set in motion by Schrödinger shenanigans felt unearned, not squaring with the emotional truth of Nao's story.

That isn't enough to ruin what is otherwise a magnificent and moving work.