I wanted to read outside my normal genre and this is one of my wife’s favorite books. She found her old copy and I brought it on a flight. It has been a LONG time since I read a book in one siting, but I read the book from start to finish between Phoenix and Boston. Even if I hadn’t been trapped on a plane, I would have had a hard time putting this one down. Apparently it won the best fantasy novel of 1988.
The novel follows 43 year old Jeff Winston, a radio journalist in an unhappy and childless marriage. He suffers a massive heart attack while on the phone with his wife on approximately page 2, and wakes up at the beginning of the next chapter back in his college dorm room with his roommate. At first terrified, he uses his knowledge of sports trivia to convert the $1000 he got from selling his car into several million by betting on the Kentucky Derby and the World Series. After a life of wealth, he suddenly dies, again, at 43, waking up back in college once again. And the cycle repeats.
The novel explores what it would mean if you could remake choices you made in your life. Some of them seem obvious… don’t enter that relationship, avoid this job, but as you get deeper into the story you realize that who you is a direct result of some of the choices you make. And when he hurtles back 25 years again and again, sometimes the choices he made in that last life haunt him forever. For example, he has a child, something he couldn’t do in his first life, but when he goes back, the child is gone, never to be born! This haunts him, and he screams in rage and despair at the child he… didn’t conceive.
I found myself extremely drawn in to this story. I felt strongly for the character, and the interesting relationship he develops with someone he meets who has a similar affliction. I was brought to tears at the “death” of his child, and the loss of some of his loves.
The story ends with him making a statement about how the choices you make and the life you live… it is your one chance and one opportunity, so make those right decisions. Think carefully, because you do only get one life. A strange observation from someone who lived multiple lives, but the message makes sense in the context of what happens in the last third of the novel.
The author died of a heart attack at the age of 59. His early life very much parallels what the main character did in his early first life. My wife wonder if perhaps he suffered form the same affliction as the story character, and went back in time and wrote this novel as an autobiography. Obviously, you write who you are and what you know, but I have not been able to stop thinking about this book for the last few days. My dreams my first night in Boston were all about skipping back through time. What would I change if I could relive the last 25 years?
This book was definitely one that made me think. It is short enough that I could easily reread it for craft tips. What is it that got me hooked into the main character? Why were my heart strings tugged so hard? I want to study this book to learn about emotional engagement with the reader. I think I can learn a lot from it.