REPLAY -- KEN GRIMWOOD

Ken Grimwood's novel Replay is thought-provoking, humorous, and engrossing. The protagonist,  Jeff Winston, suffers a heart attack on the first page and fades into unconsciousness as he stares into the red numbers on the clock. He jolts awake in his Emory University dorm room,twenty-five years in the past.


Throughout the novel, we learn that replayers live out a select portion of their lives before dying of a heart attack*, and awaken a geometric interval further in time than the previous cycle**. He falls into the body and circumstance of his past selves each time. After living through a few cycles, he finds himself sinking into a spiral of ennui. His daughter, wife, and wealth disappear in the first. He loses true love in the second. He finds, in the third, that hedonism hardly helps his psyche. Finally, he meets Pamela Phillips. A renowned director, her masterpiece film Starsea draws from her experience as a replayer. Together, Jeff and Pamela seek answers, companions, and fall in love with each other.

The characters were clearly well-written, but seemed to lack a certain realism. I can't quite put my finger on it. Voices weren't quite distinct enough, and certainly Jeff and Pamela could have a bit more depth. But these are minor complaints in the face of an otherwise breathtaking novel.

I found the effects replayers can have on the world--and, perhaps more interestingly, the effects they cannot have--to be fascinating. Jeff finds monumental success in the stock market and within the betting world because of his knowledge of future events. In one passage, he decides to invest in pantyhose because he knew that women's liberation movements would lead to higher hemlines. Pamela skews odds of living in her favour by memorising the times of plane crashes, natural disasters, and the like. Her success in the movie industry occurs after replays in which she'd been a professional artist and a doctor.

However, when Jeff tries to save John F. Kennedy, he succeeds only in foiling Lee Harvey Oswald. Another man carries out the deed instead. Is he incapable of affecting truly important events, or was there a backup shooter all along? The political ramifications of Jeff and Pamela's knowledge were explored further, when the government keeps them in custody after their accurate revelations of events a year into the future. Should replayers beholden to their nation? Would it be better to remain silent?

Replay also offers a series of existential inquiries: Does life have a purpose? Since life is so short for non-replayers, should they search for their 'true callings', instead of sinking into ennui? Are certain events pre-ordained, fixed forever in Earth's timeline? Does every event have an explanation? 

With an intriguing plot and protagonists upon whom you wish success, it's easy to see why Replay has garnered such a positive reputation, and why the seminal Groundhog Day drew such inspiration from it.

*His time of death in each replay: 1:06pm on October 22, 1988

**The protagonists never find out exactly what this interval is, though each of them live for around 200 years by novel's end.