Although Joyce Carol Oates titled her latest novel Hazards of Time Travel, her thoughts were transfixed on the present day. Specifically: the threat to democracy, intellectual life and human decency posed by the present administration. In Hazards of Time Travel, she posits a near future America of rigid social stratification and pervasive surveillance under a totalitarian regime demanding not only obedience but support.
1984 must have been on her writing desk, but her TV was surely set to Fox News while working on Hazards. The protagonist, Adriane, is arrested for “Treason-Speech” in her high school graduation speech. She’s a smart girl who had already drawn suspicion for asking too many questions in class and standing out from the herd. Some “traitors” are executed on live television (now that’s reality TV!). Most are “deleted,” their lives and all traces erased. But Adriane is given the option of “exile,” which for her means teleportation back in time to 1959, where she becomes a freshman at a small-town college in the University of Wisconsin system.
If the dystopian future has the pasteboard backdrops of many science-fiction novels, the past is where Oates’ writing becomes most vivid. Adriane is appalled by the pervasive smell of cigarettes and baffled by rotary phones. Fortunately her parents were a bit old school and taught her handwriting, without which she would have been unable to function. Her confrontation with a manual typewriter is especially telling: “You were trapped in yourself, at a typewriter. You could not escape into cyberspace.” There isn’t even a screen to look at.
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The society from which Adriane is exiled resulted from a chain of events following “the Great Terrorist Attack of 9/11/01,” but it’s impossible to learn much about it since books have disappeared and the digital archives are manipulated by the regime. Hazards of Time Travel is a chilling reflection on a possible outcome of the world’s present direction. With her 1959 passages, Oates also seems to wonder: How great was that olden days America that politicians love to invoke? Great for whom?
