Harper © 1998 [orig. pub. 1986], 320 pages [amazon]

What would you do if you had your life to live over again? Would you marry the same person? Take the same jobs? Would you attempt to change the course of history? For Jeff Winston, the protagonist of Ken Grimwood’s 1986 novel Replay, these questions are more than theoretical. After dying in 1988, at the age of 43, Jeff wakes up 25 years earlier in his dorm room at Emory. Without understanding why the clock has rewound for him, he lives the same quarter century again, making different mistakes against a familiar historical and cultural backdrop–Kennedy’s assassination and Vietnam, the Beatles and Watergate, Patty Hearst and disco and Iran-Contra.

[INSET TEXT: Without understanding why the clock has rewound for him, he lives the same quarter century again, making different mistakes against a familiar historical and cultural backdrop–Kennedy’s assassination and Vietnam, the Beatles and Watergate, Patty Hearst and disco and Iran-Contra.] What would you do if you had your life to live over again…again? Come October 18th, 1988, his second time through, Jeff finds himself powerless to prevent his death, despite his foreknowledge of the event. When he wakes up again in 1963, with everything he accomplished in the last 25 years

erased, this “second chance” at life seems more curse than gift.

We’ve all wondered, I’m sure, what we might do differently given a second shot at life. But Grimwood’s exploration of the common fantasy goes far beyond superficial what-ifs. He has so thoroughly imagined his character’s bizarre predicament that the story, fantastic in its premise, is wholly credible, and the choices Jeff makes across successive lifetimes, sometimes radically different, are renderuddy fully understandable. Grimwood also wrings surprising pathos from the story:

“He couldn’t bring himself to see Judy again. This sweet-faced adolescent girl was not the woman he had loved, but merely a empty slate with the potential to become that woman. It would be pointless, even masochistic, to repeat by rote that process of mutual becoming, when he knew too well the emotional and spiritual death to which it all would lead.”

The characters’ musings on the metaphysics of Jeff’s situation can slow Grimwood’s narrative, but otherwise this is a thoroughly enjoyable fantasy.

Tags: book reviews, books, fantasy, Ken Grimwood, Replay, time travel