If The Time Traveler's Wife cracks open a strange and original universe alive with unnerving possibilities, it is also an endearingly familiar world that author Audrey Niffenegger fashions in her inventive first novel. Set in a 20th and 21st century Chicago studded with landmarks and packed with allusions to real-life punk musicians, artists, poets, philosophers and authentic historical events (think Y2K and 9/11), The Time Traveler's Wife presents a deceptively familiar reality, augmented by the scary proposition of inadvertent time travel.

Henry DeTamble is a genetically impaired "chrono-displaced person" who first meets his future wife, Clare, while time-traveling into the past at the age of 36; at the time, Clare is 6 years old, and it is 1977. While Clare remembers Henry from age 6 on, Henry won't even know who she is until he is 28 in present time and meets up with Clare as a 20-year-old Botticelli-beautiful art student of wealthy lineage doing research at the Newberry Library, where Henry works as a librarian.

So begins a love that will endure through Henry's frequent disappearance into places from which he may never return. The novel itself creates a neat overlay of recent human history: intellectually lively, au courant, urban and hip, it also sings of a passion and lifelong devotion resonant of days gone by. Love, old-fashioned style. In the words of Clare Abshire, the title character:

Long ago men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is a slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments, lined up, waiting.

These words grow weightier when we find that each time Henry disappears, he faces dangers more bizarre than any peril at sea. He departs the present without warning, arriving elsewhere like a newborn baby, naked and vulnerable since he's stripped of all material trappings in the process of time travel. Due to the necessity of meeting such hazards, Henry develops a questionable set of skills and a faintly unsavory aura, prompting Clare's friends to question his character. Nor is there anything nostalgic about Henry's visits into the past; encountering his childhood self ("When I am time traveling sometimes I go somewhere I already am," Henry explains to Clare), adult Henry teaches young Henry certain "urgently required survival skills" which include "Shoplifting, Beating People Up, Picking Locks, Climbing Trees, Driving, Housebreaking, Dumpster Diving, and How to Use Oddball Things like Venetian Blinds and Garbage Can Lids as Weapons." What could easily come across as hopelessly improbable is rendered plausible by the solid details, skewed, often hilarious angle of Henry's vision, and lack of sentimentality.

Despite the title, the novel alternates between Clare's and Henry's point of view: Henry as purveyor of information and agent of change, Clare as maker of art and force of stability. Told in precise, clipped prose, it often reads like a journal or series of matter-of-fact reports, shading into emotional, poetic territory at more shocking moments. Since the range of Henry's time travel extends "about fifty years in each direction," it would be hard to say whether Clare or Henry holds the broader perspective. Yet it's Clare who is the center where all points meet in time and space, the anchor of the story.

The Time Traveler's Wife isn't science fiction, but Niffenegger's curiosity about the vagaries of time is evident, as she includes enough temporal twists and ricocheting perspectives to interest admirers of H.G. Wells and Heinlein. For those who find gleeful sport in the kind of half-serious, theoretical chrono-speculation invoked by contemporary novels like Time's Arrow or Einstein's Dreams, The The Time Traveler's Wife is good fun, winking at classics such as A Wrinkle in Time, A Connecticut Yankee, or Looking Backwards.

How and why Henry sometimes knows the future from his foothold in the present and can anticipate future technologies, but is other times oblivious, why he's sent off to visit himself only hours from the present, and what exactly dictates his destinations are part of the intrigue and eventually make a crazy kind of sense. (Though this reader is still trying to sort out what it means that Henry, at his first meeting with 6-year-old Clare, already seems aware of what will transpire at their later encounters in the past). The ending, too, may present something of a "grandfather paradox" (the idea that if you travel back in time and shoot your own grandfather, you'd erase your own existence, or your grandfather would always somehow duck the bullet just in time, no matter what--which seems to be Henry's view).

The novel's refractory time-scope functions most strongly, however, as a metaphor for living in the moment. Only in the here and now can the richness of life fully saturate our senses and bring us joy; food, culture, and sex take center stage for these characters, but above all, tenacious love throughout the cruelest ordeals. Henry's spontaneous journeys--triggered, significantly, by "stress"--function as an organic extension of the mental time travel we all indulge in at times (aka "spacing out") that whisks us into the past to dwell for a fond moment in childhood, or transports us out of the moment into an imagined future we desire or dread.

Ultimately this flitting in and out of the present--these impromptu, AWOL adventures--is a fact of marriage. Clare herself while grieving her mother's death has, "gone away and left" Henry, just as Clare says of Henry, at a sad moment: "Although he is right here in front of me, he has disappeared." All couples suffer from partners' inadvertent leave-takings, but few are as vulnerable to the wiles of chance as Henry and Clare (though they don't have to worry much about money). In this age when most relationships are tested by circumstances, Clare's formidable patience and placidity in the face of Henry's terrifying absences stands out. The couple's experiences of loss, pleasure, friendship, domesticity and helplessness feel authentic, strike deep, and hit hard, like our own. Their struggle for normalcy is both rippingly comic and deeply sad. All this forbearance in the face of incomprehensible obstacles creates a satisfying sense of catharsis unusual in contemporary novels.

If anything is missing, it would be a further deepening in our understanding of what drives Clare and Henry's love, which as it is, pivots mainly on Henry's tenderness and Clare's inexhaustible ability to wait. Given, however, that fascinations with waiting and time-tested love inspired Niffenegger to write The Time Traveler's Wife, she has surely succeeded, and then some.