Hazards of Time Travel: A Novel

Joyce Carol Oates

Nov 2018 · HarperAudio · Narrated by Andi Arndt

About this audiobook

An ingenious, dystopian novel of one young woman’s resistance against the constraints of an oppressive society, from the inventive imagination of Joyce Carol Oates

“Time travel” — and its hazards—are made literal in this astonishing new novel in which a recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America — “Wainscotia, Wisconsin”—that existed eighty years before.  Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town she is set upon a course of “rehabilitation”—but cannot resist falling in love with a fellow exile and questioning the constrains of the Wainscotia world with results that are both devastating and liberating.  

Arresting and visionary, Hazards of Time Travel  is both a novel of harrowing discovery and an exquisitely wrought love story that may be Joyce Carol Oates’s most unexpected novel so far.

Ratings and reviews

I really thought I'd enjoy this book, a dystopian time travel story! But I quickly discovered this wasn't what I was expecting at all. First off, the author paints the picture of an oppressive government in this story who is afraid of any free thought, or individuallity so much so that they arrest anyone who dares think outside their rigid belief system. They then would turn around and send these criminals back in time to a place where they had the freedoms to think and act how they wished, and could see others doing the same and give them a college education at the same time? Only to supposedly reintegrate these educated people who have seen and had a taste of actual freedom? Not really a realistic response from a government such as the one portrayed. The author does try to make a point that the late 1950's and early 1960's where an odd time historically, and her main characters battle against the evils and prejudices of the time, and you get the feeling that the author wants us to believe this is some sort of harsh punishment for these exiled individuals......... Also the book seems to only be a platform for the author to express her religious, political, and philosophical beliefs, and this mind numbingly evident in virtually every chapter in this book, very little effort was put into anything else honestly, not even the bizarre love story that consumed 80% of this book. Our protagonist is portrayed as an intelligent independent teenager, but for some unknown reason falls for a much older teacher, despite herself, and common sense, and basically makes herself a slave to his wishes, living to please him despite any real reciprocal affection being returned. The constant overly intellectual psycho babble in this book really did drag it down, and was very tiresome. The only redeeming plot point was the twist revealed at the end of the book, but by that point it was too little too late. It's a stretch to give this book 2 stars, 1 1/2 is more fitting.

About the author

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.