Book Review: “Time’s Mouth” by Edan Lepucki
A Runaway Success?
When I belatedly reviewed Edan Lepucki’s debut novel California earlier this year (I say belatedly since the book was first published almost a decade ago), I wasn’t sure if that novel was her first and only novel. It turns out that Lepucki has kept busy churning out books, and Time’s Mouth is the latest offering to be fired off by her imagination. It’s a book that is, on the surface, about time travel, but it also is about a subject that appears to be near and dear to the author’s heart: communes. Like California before it, Time’s Mouth is partially set on one — though this time out, it may be more of a cult than anything else. Time’s Mouth can be a bit of a kooky read, and it is certainly written in a lot looser style than California, but it largely winds up being fun and entertaining. I was on the fence about California. With Time’s Mouth, I can say that Lepucki has grown as a writer and has contributed something daringly original with her new novel that feels more enjoyable to read. It has interesting things to say about femininity and gender, too, and it works as a bit of a counterpoint to The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger because this time out, women get to time travel instead of just men.
Time’s Mouth is also a very plot-heavy book. The overarching story is one of runaways and rebellion of a sort, but the book moves from plot point to plot point, making it difficult to give a synopsis without giving whole tracts of the book away. To that end, I’ll only cover the first third or so of the book. It starts in the 1950s with a young girl named Sharon who is growing up in Mystic, Connecticut, under a father who sexually abuses her. When she’s a teenager, she discovers that she can travel backward in time to her past — but as something of a ghost, meaning that she doesn’t inhabit her body when she time travels. She decides to flee her family for the west coast, changes her name to Ursa, and winds up housesitting an estate in rural California. There, she also discovers that her time travel episodes have a hallucinogenic quality when shared with other women, so other women start descending on the property, turning it into something of a commune. Ursa has a son named Ray, who resents that his mother won’t tell him anything about her abilities, so he gets a young girl named Cherry pregnant and the duo flees for Los Angeles. Once Cherry has the baby, named Opal, she starts experiencing weird hallucinations in Opal’s presence that Ray doesn’t believe. Will Cherry stick around as Ray berates her, or will she run away from her new home, too?
That’s just a taste of what Time’s Mouth has to offer. I found it interesting that the time travel aspect is linked to the cycle of the moon and, in one overt case, menstruation. Lepucki is saying something profound here about the nature of memory and the importance of embracing both the good and bad stuff of life’s past, especially as a woman. Remember, these time travelers can’t go to the future, and the recent past is blocked off to them as well. Thus, Time’s Mouth is a book about what it means to live in your memories, and what happens when you can’t let things go. It’s also a book about generational rebellion — most of the characters wind up running away from one another at various points in the book, which I hope is not too much of a giveaway, and it is only at the novel’s end do we get any sense of closure or resolution to this part of the read. So, Time’s Mouth is about a lot of different things. Again, it would make a good comparison read to The Time Traveler’s Wife (one of my favourite books of all time, incidentally, as it is a novel that I’ve read more than once), just to see how two different female authors tackle the notion of gender and time travel in their respective volumes. While Niffenegger takes a more pessimistic view of time travel as something belonging to men’s adventures only, Lepucki comes from a more positive worldview and posits that science fiction trappings are something women can enjoy, too.
That all said, sometimes Time’s Mouth can feel very silly. Strangely, I found all the time traveling to be the least appealing aspect of this book. The reason for this is that it’s the character relationships that fuel the readability of this novel, and some of the stuff that happens in the time-traveling sequences are a tad bit on the ridiculous side. (Being able to smell an uneaten quesadilla is one issue that was problematic for me. The problem is these time travelers don’t seem to inhabit a body when they time travel. So how would they be able to smell?) The writing takes on a “Gosh! Wow!” type of quality during these segments, too, and Lepucki is at her best when she’s bringing the characters together for some quality character development time. The book is also a tad bit long with a protracted midsection about a character getting therapy from a psychologist who follows the teachings of Wilhelm Reich, who was admittedly a bit of a quack. Still, quibbles aside, Time’s Mouth can be an entertaining book. I took my time with this one — pun intended — and found it to be a rewarding read. If you’re into gender politics and soft SF, this will be a suitable book for your reading pleasure. Edan Lepucki has come a long way from California, and fans of her work — both old and new — should gobble this one up.
Edan Lepucki’s Time’s Mouth will be published by Counterpoint Press on August 1, 2023.
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