The title of this review is a quote from the novel to explain the place, our narrator, arrives in a form of political imprisonment where exiles are back in time to a middling university in the late 1950s. It also perfectly defines the novel itself.
This is does not even have a lot of potential, but it does have a few small interesting ideas. For one, it’s interesting that the narrator seems to be addressing her contemporary context as an audience instead of us.
But that’s about where it ends. It’s dreadfully weak-tea of a novel and the language she uses to code and describe the future dystopia are so bland and obvious that they’re both boring and insulting. In addition, the novel doesn’t seem to understand the motivating factors or mandates to the future dystopian government. In that way, this novel feels like a book published in 2002, and not one published in 2018. The story itself is not new material in the slightest. In part every time travel story is more or less the same, but also, the main idea here is no different from Stephen King’s 11/22/1963, but written in the bland vocabulary of bad 1950s sci fi.
There’s a strong focus here in BF Skinner’s theories of behaviorism, which is fine, and she acknowledges this is outdated, but it’s not only outdated in psychological terms, but also in cultural terms.
This is not a very good novel, but because Joyce Carol Oates can write a bad novel in her sleep, it’s more or less competent. If you can escape how bland so much of it is, it’s readable.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Hazards-Travel-Joyce-Carol-Oates/dp/0062319590/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1549628113&sr=8-1&keywords=hazards+of+time+travel)