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I forget where I saw Ken Grimwood’s 1986 novel Replay promoted, but it sounded like an interesting story, so I picked up a copy at my local public library. It’s a highly unusual and compelling time travel story.

Jeff Winston is a radio news producer in this late 40s. His job is lackluster as is his childless marriage. He’s at work and gets a phone call from his wife. As she starts speaking, he has a sudden heart attack and dies.

Jeff wakes up in his dorm room, an eighteen-year-old college freshman in the early 1960s. He has all of the memories of his life up to the moment he died twenty-five years in the future. Except that none of that has happened yet. Does it have to happen at all?

The first quarter of the book follows Jeff as he reconstructs his life based on what he knows of the future. In this case, he makes himself fabulously wealthy. Of course he drops out of college. Still feeling like a middle-aged man, the prospect of going through another four-year drudge as an undergraduate looks so depressing. But he does know a lot about major sporting events and which companies are going to be successful in the 1960s and beyond.

Since it’s 1963, he tries to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He manages to get Lee Harvey Oswald arrested before the event, but someone else takes his place. Kennedy’s death happens just as history records it, only with a different assassin.

His attempt to recreate his first meeting with his future wife fails because he’s become a very different person than the one she fell in love with. He finally marries into a family with “old money,” and while his wife is a priggish snob, he so loves their daughter.

Every doctor he sees tells him his heart is fine and he keeps himself in good shape, but at the exact date and time of the original even, he dies anyway…

…and is an eighteen-year-old freshman again, but wakes up at a slightly different point in that life.

This time, he chooses to woo his college girlfriend, makes a good but not lavish living, and while he can’t stand losing another child again (actually, she never existed in this time line but he still remembers her), they adopt two children.

It’s a good life until he dies again…

…and wakes up at a different point in his freshman year.

He stops caring anymore, makes a lot of money, but adopts a totally hedonistic lifestyle of excessive drug use and more excessive sexual practices. Why not? In another quarter of a century, he’ll die and be reborn again.

Then a plane accident makes Jeff realize this isn’t the life he wants and he walks away, eventually becoming something of a hermit farmer.

Almost by accident, he finds out about a major motion picture that came out in the early 1970s by actors and a director who are well known but way before they were supposed to be famous. This was a film that never existed before. The theme of the movie reminds him of his unique life and he looks up the producer Pamela Phillips. He discovers she is also a “replayer.”

She made the movie in the belief that all people will eventually become replayers and to “prepare” them for the experience. Since they are uniquely bonded, they become lovers.

The book is really an exploration of what it is to be human and how the choices we make change the people we become. Even knowing the future doesn’t mean you’ll know the best way to negotiate a twenty-five year lifespan and they both get plenty of chances to try different things.

Then they discover that although the date and time of their deaths remain the same (her death is always nine hours later than his), the date they wake up in the replay is getting later in history. That means the timespan they get to live out is becoming progressively shorter with each cycle.

I should say that Pamela’s original replay had her wake up at age fourteen. It was pretty amusing and tense when eighteen year old Jeff tried to make contact with her during a subsequent replay only to find out she hadn’t “returned” yet. Her father was not pleased.

Time gets shorter and shorter and there’s no answer as to why this is happening to them. They did find one other replayer, but he was a serial killer and criminally insane. During one replay, Jeff and Pam went public with proof they could “predict” the future in the hopes that scientists could study them and find out the cause of their replays. All that happened was that the Federal government took them prisoner…uh, into “protective custody,” and tried to use them to protect America’s interests. Problem was, once world history changed too much, they didn’t know what was going to happen.

Pam’s last replay comes first but Jeff can’t let her go. He contrives to meet her (she has no memory of any replays and only knows her original life) at an art museum (he hired a private detective and had her followed). She’s in an unhappy marriage and he contrives to have an affair with her. But five days before they are both to die again, she has another replay. Pam is deeply upset Jeff chose to manipulate her and walks away from him.

But it’s not over…

Jeff replays within days and then hours of his death. Finally, it’s minutes and even seconds which is disorienting and terrifying. What happens at the final replay?

He wakes up still alive. The chest pains go away and he’s on the phone with his wife who has called him to talk about their troubled marriage. Jeff still remembers all of the replays and wonders about Pam. Calling her, he finds out she remembers everything, too. But she’s married with two children and realizes she can’t just leave them.

Jeff decides, based on his multiple lifetimes of experience, that he needs to stay with his wife and try to work things out. This will be the first time in a couple of centuries of living when he won’t know what’s going to happen next.

You could say this is a cop out, but I think it has a good point. This novel uses science fiction as a tool to explore how people work, think, feel, relate to one another, and make decisions, even when they believe they know how those decisions will play out.

The author based a lot of Jeff on his own life. Both were raised in Florida and went to Emory College in Atlanta. Both had a career in radio broadcasting and Grimwood was in a childless marriage ending in divorce.

The stunner is that Grimwood died of a heart attack in 2003 at the age of 59. I know this probably didn’t happen, but I wonder if somehow he is replaying. If so, I hope he finds his Pamela.

This is a very different and very good book. I burned through it in about a day, so it’s an easy read. I recommend it.