he narrator of A Shortcut in Time, Josh Winkler, is an artist who has lived all his life in Euclid, Ill., as has his wife, Flo, a physician, and their teenage daughter, Penny. Josh and Flo were drawn together in large part through a shared childhood tragedy that left Flo's brother dead and Josh's brother Kurt brain-damaged. Jack Ketch, the son of the town sheriff, was responsible, but he was never brought to justice and grew up to become sheriff himself. Josh leads a relatively happy and stable life in Euclid despite the simmering hostility between him and Sheriff Ketch and the ongoing tragedy of brother Kurt.
Josh's quiet life is disrupted forever when, while walking on one of the town's "perp walks"—irregular paths that run perpendicular to Euclid's regular grid of streets, and which local residents use as shortcuts—he encounters a strange young woman in a long dress who briefly confronts him, then flees. Later, again while traveling on the perp walk, Josh experiences first a minor then a major dislocation, the second of which leaves him convinced he has traveled backward in time—a conviction that deepens when the young woman reappears, identifies herself as Constance Morceau and claims to be from the year 1908.
Josh shares his time-travel theory only with his disbelieving wife and bemused daughter as he tries to keep Constance from discovering too much about her own history so she will be less likely to affect history when and if she returns to her own time. However, word leaks out, and soon the town's teenagers are running down the perp walks attempting to trigger their own trips through time. Eventually, Constance manages to return to her own time—but then Penny disappears. Despite Flo's increasing hostility and Ketch's increasing surveillance, Josh manages to travel to 1918, where both Constance and Penny are threatened by a flu epidemic. Their actions in 1918 inevitably have consequences for the present; by the end of the novel, the tangled situations faced by Josh and those around him—some related to time travel, others not—resolve themselves in unexpected ways that are, if not wholly tragic, then also not without loss.
A resonant past, a believable present
A Shortcut in Time is more a novel of character than of concept; Dickinson is not nearly as concerned with how time travel works as with its consequences for people's lives. As might be expected from an author of mainstream literature who has won an O. Henry Award for short fiction, the novel is elegantly written, and Dickinson is willing both to spend plenty of time with his characters and also make them fully believable and human—which also means, on occasion, less than lovable.
Josh Winkler indulges in guilt and self-recrimination because his wife makes more money than he does; he also seems at times distressingly distant from the plight of his brother Kurt. Flo reveals latent resentment against her husband as she becomes increasingly hostile to his claims of time travel. And Constance, far from being an exotic and fragile victim from the past, is determined to use her extraordinary experience to her advantage. Late in the novel, she is even accused of failing, through deliberate inaction, to prevent a tragedy upon her return to her own time.
It should not be thought, though, that this is a gloomy, slow, "literary" novel whose SF element is incidental. Far from it. Dickinson's fine writing and well-rounded characterization are all in the service of a carefully constructed plot that keeps the reader turning the pages. If the book falters slightly in the middle, as the author spends perhaps a bit too much time on did-she-or-didn't-she dialogue and appears to forget about certain plot elements that had been strongly foregrounded earlier on, the final third of the novel, when Josh travels to 1918 in search of his daughter, is very well done.
Dickinson has an excellent eye for historical detail without getting bogged down in it, and his historical characters are as convincing as his contemporary ones. Admirably, he makes it quite clear that the past is neither a lost paradise nor an unimaginable cesspool; like the present, it is simply its own place. And the book's final chapter pulls all the plot threads together in a manner both unexpected, moving, and—crucially for what is still, after all, a science-fiction novel—utterly believable.
