Every Anxious Wave by Mo Daviau
reviewed by Lauren Prastien

Every Anxious Wave by Mo Daviau
St. Martin's Press, 2016
Hardcover, 288 pages
There’s something about reading a book that you know was written with love. Because there are works of tremendous talent that you can tell were a real pain in the ass to write. There are writers who you suspect may not like their characters so much. There are novels that no matter how gorgeous, no matter how skillful, you get the pervading feeling that the author is squeezing the book out like the last dredges of toothpaste from the bottom of the tube.

But then there are the books that you can tell were complete labors of love, the kind of story that makes you feel like you’re at a bar with old friends during one of those nights you hope against the laws of time won’t end. Which is why I encourage you to clear an evening when you sit down with Mo Daviau’s Every Anxious Wave, because you will have a very difficult time putting it down.

In Every Anxious Wave, Karl Bender, mild-mannered bartender and former guitarist of the now-defunct body-positive rock band the Axis, discovers a wormhole in the back of his closet. The story is something of a hybrid High Fidelity/Being John Malkovich/The Time Traveler’s Wife. At first, Karl Bender and his affable drinking buddy Wayne use the wormhole to send a small clientele back in time to see acts like Elliott Smith in their prime. But when Wayne attempts to prevent John Lennon’s assassination in 1980, Karl accidentally sends his friend back to 980. 
“YOU’RE TOO DUMB TO FIX THIS YOURSELF, GO FIND AN ASTROPHYSICIST,” a disgruntled Wayne texts (don’t question it) from the tenth-century island of Mannahatta.
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So Karl enlists the services of Lena Geduldig, a no-nonsense, gutsy astrophysicist and former fan of the Axis. As the two devise a plan to retrieve Wayne, they break their own rules about time travel, meddle with their pasts and futures, and fall in love. Except Wayne decides he prefers the past (“SO MUCH FISH,” Wayne relays in one of his trademark all-caps texts) and Lena considers using time-travel to prevent her traumatic adolescent rape, which would endanger her and Karl’s relationship. Faced with losing both Wayne and Lena, Karl confronts the realities of regret, loss and the irresistible pull of the past.

The story never gets too mired in the complexities of time travel, though it manages to touch on the very real issue of our crumbling and neglected environment. It’s probably the most light-hearted book about mourning I’ve ever read, a spunky, cheeky tale of moving on and accepting the truth of loss. Every Anxious Wave is charismatic and comical, its characters painted to feel both unusual and familiar. You know someone like them, even if there’s no one precisely like them. They were made carefully, rendered lovingly. Despite their follies and their fixations, Daviau never takes the easy route of ridiculing her characters, never turns an absurd plot into a farce. And what you’re left with is something impossibly charming, a book that is capable of touching that delicate place between mirth and nostalgia. Like a night out with old friends, like a drive around a city that used to be yours.

​But it is the compassionate rendering and care for these characters that has made me so ambivalent about the book’s ending. For a book about loss, Every Anxious Wave allows Karl Bender to emerge mostly unscathed. That which he ultimately parts with has been long-gone, and there’s a sense our hero gets to have his cake and eat it too. It feels as if Daviau so loves her people that she ultimately has to protect them from the situation she has devised for them. There are no “darlings” among the body count of Every Anxious Wave. While I can’t help but feel relieved for my new friends, what does it mean to create this universe and not let it touch them roughly enough to leave any scars?  
Lauren Prastien is a Zell Fellow at the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program, where she previously completed her MFA in Fiction. She is also a blogger for Michigan Quarterly Review. Her writing can be found at Refinery29, National Ave, and elsewhere.