Review of Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates

I often wish JCO would write more science fiction.

This felt a bit like A Handmaid’s Tale. The initial sections describing the system of rewards and punishment, how society has morphed into this recognizable, twisted near-future I found less compelling than the love story at the heart of the novel. This not her most popular work, nor her most approachable or best written, but the campus life novel is something the author excels at. The school sections were as engrossing as her other examples in the genre, but the police state twist did not contribute much to the character development.
If you take it is a light, easy read, without trying to draw deep meaning from it, it should satisfy that itch. When you think about it as a work of literature you’ll find it falling short.
Time travel stories are most interesting when they create alternate histories or explore futures and pasts we have scarcely imagined. Going back to the 60s or 40s or 20s is slightly less intriguing to me. I’m looking for something akin to H. G. Wells’ book, not Midnight in Paris. I never pictured JCO as a hard-science fiction writer, so the science here is nonexistent, and it reads like social science fiction.
The blurb calls it ‘visionary,’ but it’s not doing anything that hasn’t been done before. Too many abbreviations, which detracted from my immersion in the story, weighing the narrative down. You have to pick which world-building elements actually play into the plot. Throwing in random organizational regulations and such won’t hook your reader at all. Aside from the early info dumps, the narrative smooths out after the protagonist is exiled in time as a punishment for her curiosity. (The premise seems ridiculous. Couldn’t she have found a better set up to get to the sections she was clearly more interested in writing?)
The main character spends much time examining her relationship with a teacher – an inherently unhealthy one. The psychology seems ripped out of a textbook, shoehorned into a novel that should be about endemic social issues but is too focused on the interiority of the main character.
On a sentence level, competently written. From a structural perspective, the book fails. As pure entertainment, it is definitely readable.
In my JCO reading journey, of the so-far twenty plus books of hers I’ve read, it was on the weak end. But it succeeded in being memorable.