This Time Tomorrow

“‘I’ll be back on Tuesday. I love you.’ She touched his arm. Alice was used to it now, the affection. She had never told her father she loved him before he went into the hospital.”

Leonard’s impending death has erased boundaries of affection between Alice and her father. Though Alice didn’t tell her father she loved him in the past, the bigger narrative of their relationship suggests that they didn’t need to express their love in words. Now that there is little Alice can do for her father, the words “I love you” make her feel more connected to him. It is unclear if he can hear her, but she hopes that he can. This quote emphasizes Alice’s commitment to making her father’s final days meaningful within the loss of control that this death pulls her into.

“What was the percentage of people who actually got to die while feeling loved and supported by their spouse? Ten percent?”

Alice is good at contextualizing her anxieties and fears by placing herself within the scope of human experience. Her father’s impending death highlights the lack of a large family because Alice is the only one there for him—there is no one else. She wonders if marriage is the answer to not dying alone, as her father is, but reminds herself that even people in happy lifelong marriages don’t always get to die together. A death that is drawn-out and surrounded by loving support is rare because so many people die unexpectedly and alone. This quote reveals Straub’s message that human beings are essentially alone, but that doesn’t mean that companionship is meaningless.

“He was young, he was young, he was young. Alice did the math in her head—if she was 16, it meant that Leonard was forty-nine years old. Less than a decade older than she was. Alice was used to thinking of life as a series of improvements—high school to college, college to adulthood, twenties to thirties. Those had all felt like laps in a race she was doing well in—but Alice could see in her father all the ruin that was to come.”

Seeing Leonard as a younger and healthier man only exacerbates Alice’s sadness over her father’s slow death. Alice’s understanding of life as a domino effect of decisions is challenged by her father’s impending death. Seeing him again at age 49 reminds her of mortality and the fallacy of planned time.

“Being a kid was wild—it was someone else’s job to buy the milk and the cereal, to make sure that there was toothpaste […] but everything you did—an SAT prep course on Saturdays, going to high school—was in service of some ambiguous, soft-focus future.”

One thing Alice learns when she travels back in time is how carefree her life as a teenager was. Without adult responsibilities, with her whole future ahead of her and the security net of her father, Alice’s stresses at the time seemed serious but in hindsight are freeing. This quote emphasizes how impossible it is for people to appreciate the privilege of youth while they’re living it.

“Being a parent seemed like a truly shitty job—by the time you were old and wise enough to understand what mistakes you’d made, there was literally no chance that your children would listen. Everyone had to make their own mistakes.”

Alice doesn’t regret not having children, though most of her friends are married with kids. In this quote, Straub emphasizes the challenge of parenthood as a conflict of self-identification. It is hard enough to be an individual; Alice knows this well enough even though she has a stable life that she likes. It takes decades, if not one’s entire lifetime, to be comfortable with oneself and analyze how past mistakes and decisions have informed that character development. To have to be responsible for someone else’s growth, or to let that person grow into their own autonomous selves, must add to the stresses of self-identity formation. This quote highlights Alice’s appreciation for her father and even implies that she can sympathize with her mother’s turning away from the responsibility of motherhood to pursue her own interests.

“New York City did this over and over again, of course, a snake shedding its skin in bits and pieces, so slowly that by the time the snake was brand new, no one would notice.”

The use of New York City as a setting for this novel is symbolic because it is juxtaposed with Alice’s sense of self and character development. New York City is in constant flux; the city changes with new cultures, trends, and time. Meanwhile, Alice has remained mostly the same. But Alice is inspired by the constant change of the city, a manifestation of her desire to see development in her life. As long as she lives in New York City and experiences the shifting nature of the city, she can feel as though she, too, is changing. The slowness of this change is notable because, just as people don’t necessarily notice how the city changes, so too does Alice not realize how her life changes when it does.

“Alice kissed Sam’s cheek, and then the other cheek, like they always did, who knows why. There were so many customs, so many codes, so many habits. Teenage girls’ skeletons were half bones and half secrets that only other teenage girls knew.”

A poignant relationship is the one between Alice and Sam. Best friends since high school, they maintain their friendship over the decades even though life changes their dynamics. Their friendship is based in the intimacies of these teenage codes. There is no explanation or even meaning behind their rituals except that those rituals exist. The presence of their habits with one another portrays the depths of their friendship. They don’t need an explanation for why or how their dynamic exists. This implies that their friendship is so deep and authentic that they don’t need to search for reasons that explain one another.

“Central Park wasn’t made for exercise. It was made for this, for tucking away into a shady grove of trees and sitting on a bench. It was made for low voices and secret affairs. The size of the park […] sounded antithetical to intimacy, but that’s what it was, intimate […] Alice loved the park—loved that there was something so glorious, so seemingly endless, that belonged to her as much as it belonged to anyone else.”

In this quote, Straub focuses on Central Park as an important micro-setting in the metropolis of the city. Living in cities provides anonymity but also restricts privacy. Central Park offers a respite for the chaos of the city and gives people an opportunity to sneak away. Notably, Alice’s love for the city extends beyond her teenage experiences. Thus, no matter how she changes or doesn’t change, time travel or not, Alice can always rely on Central Park.

“Maybe that was the trick to life: to notice all the tiny moments in the day when everything else fell away and, for a split second, or maybe even a few seconds, you had no worries, only pleasure, only appreciation of what was right in front of you.”

As Alice endures her father’s slow death and her bizarre experience with time travel, she puts her life into perspective and contemplates what is truly meaningful. It’s easy to consider the span of a lifetime in large moments of achievements and celebrations, but Alice learns that it’s the smaller, more intimate moments of happiness that build happy memories and happy lives. The dynamics with her father are developed positively from a lifetime of happy moments. This quote also expresses one of Straub’s messages in this novel: to appreciate living in the moment and the smaller joys that comprise a life.

“Alice has always thought of her professional life in perfect contrast with her father’s—he’d had wild success, and she, none, just hanging on to something stable like a seahorse with its tail looped around some seagrass—but now she thought that she’d been wrong. He was afraid, too, and happier to stay close to what had worked, rather than risk it all on something new.”

Now that Alice can meet her father again at age 16 but with the life knowledge of a 40-year-old, she sees that she’s been wrong about her perspective on her father’s career. Her father had one major success, but that success endured for his lifetime. Until now Alice has seen her own work in juxtaposition with her father’s. Unlike Leonard, she gave up on her dream to create art. But like her father, Alice plays her life by a set of safe guidelines. They are both risk-averse and prefer not to rock their boats. This quote reveals not only that Alice may have been wrong about her father, and that only through time travel can she get to understand him more, but also that the adage “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” applies to their relationship. Alice has subconsciously learned to be risk-averse by watching, but not analyzing, her father’s trajectory.

“There was never this—a day spent floating from one thing to another. This was how Alice imagined marriage, and family—always having someone to float through the day with, someone with whom it didn’t take three emails and six texts and a last-minute reservation change to see one another. Everyone had it when they were kids, but only the truly gifted held on to it in adulthood.”

One thing Alice is dissatisfied with in her adult life is the amount of time and work it takes to see someone she loves. In childhood, it’s easy to meet up with people and spend a day surrounded by companions. In adulthood, other responsibilities get in the way. Alice wonders if marriage and family life would add this easy companionship to her day, implying that—though Alice insists to herself that she’s happy being single and childless—there is something missing in her adult life. This quote again emphasizes a lesson learned only through the reflections Alice gets to experience by traveling back in time. She used to take advantage of days “floating” around with her father because she didn’t know any other life.

“Even though he routinely mocked terrible sci-fi novels and movies and television shows, even ones made by his friends, Alice knew that he loved it. The impossible being possible. The limits of reality being pushed beyond what science can fully explain. Sure, it was a metaphor, it was a trope, it was a genre, but it was also fun.”

Straub’s novel is also a celebration of the fantasy and sci-fi novel. Though not strictly a sci-fi novel itself, it pays homage to the creative boundary-pushing of the fantasy genre. Through sci-fi and fantasy, authors can explore the liminality of the human experience. Leonard’s novel may have originally been a one-hit wonder, but his love for the genre influences Alice’s appreciation of the inexplicable.

“People changed and they didn’t. People evolved and they didn’t. Alice imagined a graph that showed how much people’s personalities shifted after high school on one axis and on the other, how many miles away from home they had moved […] What did Alice have to mark her time on earth? She was frozen in amber, just pretending to swim.”

As Alice travels through time, she discovers the fallacy of true change. Some people change, and some people don’t. What propels change is perhaps unknowable. But here, Alice wonders if distance from home offers that chance of growth and change. Alice lives in the same city she grew up in, in the same apartment she’s had for decades, and works for the same school she attended. Alice, therefore, wonders if her lack of change is because she didn’t move away from the familiarity of home. Here, the external influences of home and environment are implied to be major factors in internal character development.

“Alice looked at the yellow spots on her finger, slick little nicotine patches. What if she exercised, ever? What if she didn’t drink forty ounces of beer all in one sitting? What if she had paid attention in math class? What if she had actually enjoyed her father as much as she could, every day? What if Leonard had exercised, or learned to cook, or quit something? What if she could fix everything that ever went wrong and he would live until he was ninety-six and then die in his sleep? All she wanted was for everything to change, all the bad stuff.”

In this quote, Straub demonstrates the very human spiral of engaging in “what if” questions. Once Alice goes down this road, it’s difficult to keep perspective. There are so many things anyone could change about their past if they had the chance to. Here, Alice specifically fixates on wondering if she could have changed her and her father’s future by taking more care of their bodies. Corporeality is a major human concern because humans can ignore their bodies until they start turning against themselves, typically in older age. But Alice eventually recognizes that the idea that knowing the damage we do to our bodies will change the way we treat our bodies is a fallacy of imagination. Ultimately, mortality is real for everyone, even the very healthy.

“Alice had believed she would have children someday, until she didn’t anymore. It was like balancing a bowling ball in the middle of a seesaw. There were people who were so sure, one direction or the other, and then there were people like her, who had never really decided until one day they stopped paying attention and then got knocked sideways.”

Here Alice reflects that in life, some things are decided and other things are determined by indecision. Alice assumed motherhood would be in the future, but it never quite panned out. Though she didn’t actively decide not to have children, her childlessness happened as a matter of course.

“The trees leaned over the stone walls like neighbors sharing sugar, some bending low to shade benches below. The apartment buildings that faced the park weren’t glossy monstrosities like Alice could see poking into the skyline in midtown. These buildings were limestone and brick, elegant and sturdy. It could have been any year in the last five decades.”

In this quote, Straub uses a simile to compare the trees around Alice’s apartment with Tommy to neighbors sharing sugar. This simile captures the imagery of community that Alice doesn’t always experience in a city as large and diverse as New York. But this quote also emphasizes the timeless nature of the apartment building, which “could have been in any year in the last five decades.” This description also provides a juxtaposition with the ever-changing nature of New York culture that Alice likes so much.

“Everyone died, of course. Everyone died in the end, at some unknown point in the future. People were supposed to die when their loved ones could nod and grieve and say, It was their time. What had Alice done, if not undone time?”

A central conflict in this novel is Alice’s struggle to accept her father’s impending death. Though the idea of mortality is easy enough to acknowledge, the reality of mortality is much more challenging. On death, people often speak of timing, the idea being that people die when the time is right. This is a coping mechanism because there is no way of truly knowing what the right time is. For Alice, time is about undoing so she can avoid the idea that time and death are natural and unavoidable parts of life.

“She could go back more easily than she could go forward. Going forward was scary, because anything could have happened. Anything could happen. Anything had been proven to be within a fairly narrow range, but still—Alice couldn’t control it.”

Although traveling through time allows Alice a level of autonomy over her life that people who don’t time travel can’t achieve, there is still little that she can control about the future. This emphasizes that no matter many decisions we can make, there is no way of predicting the ripple effects that each decision may cause. Because people don’t change drastically, their futures don’t change drastically. Still, changes in the future are mostly out of Alice’s control. This emphasizes the importance of allowing life to unfurl in the way that it will.

“Science fiction only has to make sense within its own walls, even if the walls are your world.”

Leonard’s reflection about how science fiction works within specific walls is an important way of looking at time travel, Straub’s novel, and the idea of making endless decisions about a life. Just as science fiction only has to make sense within the walls of its own story, so too does an individual’s real life need to make sense and be meaningful only to themselves.

“He was who he was, and she loved him for it, especially that version of him, the young one who lived like nothing could hurt him. She’d been putting it off, saying goodbye to that version of her dad. Whatever happened on the other end, whether he was conscious or unconscious, he was somewhere else now—slower and stodgier. No one could be young forever. Not even her father, who had time-traveled, who had invented worlds, who had made things that would outlast him. Who had made her.”

In an important moment of conflict resolution, Alice comes to the understanding that the father she is trying to save is not the same father she grew up with. Necessarily, time and age have taken their toll on Leonard. In trying to save her younger and healthier father, Alice isn’t accepting her older and unhealthier father, though both versions are beloved to her. Unconditional love is an important part of their relationship. In accepting the reality of his inevitable aging and death, Alice can demonstrate that unconditional love.

“October was a good month to confront death—this was why Halloween worked. The trees were mostly bare and the air was warm enough that you hadn’t yet pulled out a heavy coat. It was a month on the cusp, nature shifting from one mode to another. In transition.”

The setting of autumn in New York City contributes to Alice’s resolution to come to terms with her father’s death. The transitory nature of autumn parallels the liminality of Alice’s experiences traveling through time. It also symbolizes change. Just as the leaves fall in preparation for winter hibernation, so too does a human’s life change over time. Alice and Leonard are both in a transition period. Thus, season contributes to Straub’s overall message about The Importance of Moving Forward.

“She couldn’t save him—Alice knew that. Leonard didn’t even like that kind of science fiction, the books with medical advancements that could sustain people for centuries, the books with brains in jars, the books with immortal vampires of power-hungry magicians. He thought that easy resolutions were utterly lacking in verisimilitude.”

Leonard’s passion for science fiction informs Alice’s understanding of her own life. In good science fiction, conclusions aren’t tied with a nice bow, and magical or superstitious forces only keep readers away from the reflection of human existence available in a piece of science fiction. This attitude also reflects that of Straub’s father, the famous horror writer Peter Straub, who also believes in untidy endings and human-like supernatural qualities. What’s more, this quote is important because it emphasizes why Alice must stop using time travel as a way of saving her father—it’s a narrative plot he wouldn’t appreciate.

“Fiction, maybe, or art—were those religions? Believing that the stories you told could save you, and could reach everyone you had ever loved?”

Leonard and Alice are connected through their mutual appreciation of fiction. Rather than think about Leonard’s impending death as a spiritual moment informed by some religious belief, both Leonard and Alice see it as a narrative reality. People in real life, as in fiction, die because death is a necessary part of the human experience, which fiction brings to life. Alice—and by extension Straub—asks if you can be saved by believing in stories. The narratives about our lives are as important as any other text. Thus, Alice may have to say goodbye to her father, but she’ll always have the story of Leonard to comfort her and believe in.