Mitch Albom\u2019s new novel, \u201cTwice,\u201d is about a man with the miraculous ability to travel back to any point in his life and make a different choice. A few hours after starting \u201cTwice,\u201d I knew exactly which choice I would make differently.<\/p>\n
But alas, here we are.<\/p>\n
The story begins in a police station in the Bahamas. Alfie Logan has been detained for questioning after winning more than $2 million correctly playing three straight roulette numbers at a casino. Detective Vincent LaPorta, an experienced investigator of gambling fraud, suspects foul play.<\/p>\n
Instead of defending himself, though, Alfie produces a thick handwritten notebook that details the love story of his life. The detective tells him to read it aloud. Whenever Alfie flags, Detective LaPorta orders him to \u201ckeep reading.\u201d<\/p>\n
That part, at least, rings true: This is the kind of novel that a guard in a locked room must force you to keep reading.<\/p>\n
\u201cI get to do things twice,\u201d Alfie says. \u201cI get a second chance at everything. Do-overs. Rollbacks. Whatever you want to call them. It\u2019s a gift. A power. There\u2019s no explanation. But while everyone in the world must suffer the consequences of their actions, I can undo mine and try again.\u201d<\/p>\n
Welcome to \u201cTuesdays With Billy Pilgrim.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alfie was 8 years old, living with his missionary parents in Kenya, when he discovered he could travel back in time by tapping any part of his body and saying the word \u201ctwice.\u201d While he instantly reappears in the past with his knowledge of the future, everyone else begins reliving that moment as though it were their first time.<\/p>\n
Before you get too excited about locating this time-traveling hero, I should mention that Albom confesses in an author\u2019s note that \u201cAlfie is fictional.\u201d Damn you, quantum physics!<\/p>\n
But let\u2019s suspend our disbelief for as long as we possibly can.<\/p>\n
When Alfie\u2019s mom dies, the boy learns the limits of his power: There is no changing mortality. And he cannot travel back to anything he has not experienced himself. He can\u2019t redo love. Or take anybody back into the past with him. There may be some other guidelines I missed. The rules of this scheme seem to evolve in a haphazard, nonsensical way that will sound familiar to anyone who has played cards with an aggressive 6-year-old.<\/p>\n
But for all his godlike ability to relive time, Alfie enjoys an adolescence furnished with modular events picked up from Ikea\u2019s fiction department: friends daring him to ring the doorbell of a scary woman\u2019s house; bullies taunting his sensitive Black friend; a cute girl kissing him during Seven Minutes in Heaven. These generic moments skim by like we are watching \u201cThe Wonder Years\u201d at triple speed.<\/p>\n
As Alfie gets older, he gets bolder, but Albom grows no more interested in making his experiences engaging. It is as though Alfie\u2019s ability to cheat consequences has drained urgency from the prose. Secure in the knowledge that he can relive any moment, Alfie has \u201cleapt off a mountain in Spain, dived into a pool of sharks in Australia, stood in front of an oncoming train in China.\u201d That litany of adventures demonstrates the abiding flaw of \u201cTwice\u201d: The narration is utterly colorless. Absolved of the possibility of death, the novel suffers the ennui that vampires endure. Alfie\u2019s memory of taking \u201ca bullet during a Mexican bank robbery\u201d feels less vibrant than my memory of dinner at the Olive Garden.<\/p>\n
It is astonishing that a man who has sold tens of millions of copies, an author who presumably has access to the finest editors in the business, can continue to produce lines that feel so synthetic and recycled. Albom sometimes even highlights Alfie\u2019s clich\u00e9s: \u201cYou know that expression \u2018bowled over\u2019?\u201d he asks. \u201cThat\u2019s how I constantly felt.\u201d Later, he says, \u201cThis is what they mean when they say \u2018choked up\u2019 because I really was.\u201d<\/p>\n
But remember Detective LaPorta\u2019s orders: Keep reading.<\/p>\n
Eventually, Alfie finds the love of his life, a young woman named Gianna Rule, who wants to become a nature photographer. He follows her to college, where she already has a soccer-star boyfriend with \u201cperfect teeth.\u201d This is too bad for Alfie, but it is a full-blown disaster for us because it inspires him to begin offering lessons in \u201cThe Truth About True Love.\u201d<\/p>\n
No. 1: \u201cWhat we yearn for, deep down, is a heart that will embrace us after we make a fool of ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
At this point, I began to wonder how many bullets were in Detective LaPorta\u2019s gun.<\/p>\n
The real tragedy here is that Albom still demonstrates a capacity for genuine tenderness. A scene with Alfie and Gianna trapped on opposite sides of a revolving door in Gimbels is adorable. But such authentic moments \u2013 and the fresh descriptions needed to make them sing \u2013 are far too rare in this novel, which is bonkers but bland.<\/p>\n
Alfie\u2019s romance with Gianna will eventually bloom, of course, but can a nature photographer and a time traveler make it work in this crazy, mixed-up world?<\/p>\n
Before we find the answer to that question, we have to follow Alfie to L.A. for a fling with Hollywood\u2019s hottest female action star. This inane episode reads like an author fantasy that for decency\u2019s sake should be periodically deleted along with one\u2019s web history. But periodically deleting things is Alfie\u2019s specialty, which saps the consequences from everything in this novel, leaving us only with those gooey Truths about True Love.<\/p>\n
The truth I learned in \u201cTwice\u201d is that once is more than enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mitch Albom\u2019s new novel, \u201cTwice,\u201d is about a man with the miraculous ability to travel back to any…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":492045,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[3444,77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-492044","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115357829322351989","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=492044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492044\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/492045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=492044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=492044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=492044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}