Author: Ken Grimwood
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WORTHY!
Set in 1987 (and other years!) Jeff Winston, a tired and disaffected radio journalist with an unhappy marriage is talking with his wife on the phone. Just as she's telling him, "We need...", he has what feels like a heart attack and he agonizes not only over the intense pain, but also over the feeling that he will never know what his wife was about to tell him they need. A divorce? A gallon of milk?
When Jeff comes round, he's not in a hospital, he's in his bed in his college dorm at Emory University, and it's in 1963! He's somehow materialized inside his own youthful body, but with all his memories for the next quarter century still in his brain.
Jeff tries to pick up his life there, while also trying to figure out what the heck happened. He decides he cannot stand the thought of being a student all over again, and realizes he can make some money by betting on games and horses (for which he needs a legal age fellow-student to help). He already knows the outcome - or at least hopes he does, and it turns out he's not wrong. He becomes a millionaire and tries to track down his wife as she was then, but when he finds her, she doesn't appreciate this teenager claiming to be rich trying to pick her up on the beach!
He eventually settles in his new life with no answers, but with a wife and a child, and enjoys his life and his daughter. He takes especial care of his health, particularly as he starts to approach the date when he had his 'heart attack' in his 'previous life', but despite being in excellent health, he still goes through exactly the same pain, and the same 'rebirth' - back as a student - and it keeps repeating!
No matter what he does, he discovers over time, he can neither explain nor break this cycle. The only thing which seems to him to change is the point at which he replays his life: the starting point seems to be later each time he returns, and the period of the delay is growing larger with each replay.
He despairs of getting out of this cycle, and he eventually reaches a point where he simply doesn't care any more. Each time he comes back, he makes money as fast as he can at the start; then he launches upon a life of dissipation, drugs, free love (it's the sixties!) and on and on, until one point where he almost dies in an air-crash, at which point he starts memorizing all natural and man-made disasters.
Eventually living a public life is of no interest and he retreats to the mountains, but on a visit back to civilization to pick up supplies one day, he encounters a poster for a blockbuster movie which he's neither seen nor heard of before - not in any life. Not understanding how such a blockbuster of a movie could have escaped his attention, he goes to see it and is so moved by it that he has to meet the writer-director - which he can given how rich he is.
The meeting doesn't go well, it turns out that the woman, Pamela Phillips, is a replayer, too, and they do not get along at first. Eventually they do hook up and they begin an effort to locate other replayers. They have limited success, finding only a guy who is a replayer but who is confined to an institution because he's become psychotic.
Jeff and Pamela begin planning and meeting each other on subsequent replays, which proves to be a significant problem at first, since she is several years younger than he is, and her father doesn't appreciate an adult man visiting his fourteen year old daughter no matter how well they seem to know each other! They work this out eventually, and it's over this period that they really appreciate that their replays are starting with significantly increasing delays.
At one point they make the mistake of publishing predictions in an effort to try to find out what's going on. When their predictions prove amazingly accurate, the government becomes involved and the two of them end up as virtual prisoners in a world going to hell because of the government second-guessing their predictions and trying to capitalize on their knowledge of the future. The world quickly changes so much that they can no longer predict anything.
With their replays becoming increasingly shorter, and Pamela's returns appearing dramatically later than Jeff's things eventually come to a head when Jeff meets her before she has returned, when she is married to someone else. He maneuvers her into having an affair with him, which succeeds because he knows exactly how to ingratiate himself with her by then. When she suddenly replays in the middle of one of their clandestine dates, she's really angry with him taking advantage of her, and she quits seeing him altogether.
The repeat replays become faster and faster, and the delay times shorter and shorter until it's like one constant replay after another and suddenly, he's back at his desk, with his wife saying "We need..." but this time he doesn't 'die', the moment passes and he's still there on the phone. His wife finishes her sentence at last "...to talk" and he agrees.
This novel is one of my all time favorites. It takes great skill (and a heck of a lot of work!) to write 'the same story' over and over again, yet make it so different each time that it still makes for a fresh read. I'm in awe of Grimwood's skill in writing this so well, and selfishly saddened that his loss meant that the sequel he was beginning work on would never get completed. According to wikipedia, there's talk of a movie from the novel, but nothing is up on the web yet.
