Toddler on "Family Guy" / THU 11-30-23 / Enterprise Holdings holding / French region known for its rieslings / Gaming company with the Yakuza franchise / Disney title role for Liu Yifei / Forte and Strong once worked on it for short / Cylinders like the 20,000+ housed in London's Musical Museum

Constructor: Jeffrey Martinovic and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: TIME TRAVEL (57A: Science fiction concept depicted three times in this puzzle) — a three-letter word for a unit of "time" appears in circled squares inside an answer three times; that word has to "travel" backwards or forwards along its row, and attach the beginning or end of the other answer on that row, in order for the clues for that row to make sense:

Theme answers:

• MAN / PAGE LAYOUT (19A: Make do / 20A: Unfold, as a series of events) (move AGE backward one answer to get MANAGE and PLAY OUT)
• SHOE RACKS / SING (33A: Astonishes / 37A: Clearing, as device storage) (move ERA forward one answer to get SHOCKS and ERASING)
• GALL / IMPROVE ON (43A: Armada ship / 45A: Unscripted comedy) (move EON backward one answer to get GALLEON and IMPROV)

Word of the Day: Jennifer EGAN (32D: Jennifer who wrote "A Visit From the Goon Squad") —

Jennifer Egan (born 1962) is an American novelist and short-story writer. Her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. As of February 28, 2018, she is the president of PEN America. [...] Egan has been hesitant to classify A Visit from the Goon Squad as either a novel or a short story collection, saying, "I wanted to avoid centrality. I wanted polyphony. I wanted a lateral feeling, not a forward feeling. My ground rules were: every piece has to be very different, from a different point of view. I actually tried to break that rule later; if you make a rule then you also should break it!" The book features genre-bending content such as a chapter entirely formatted as a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. Of her inspiration and approach to the work, she said, "I don't experience time as linear. I experience it in layers that seem to coexist ... One thing that facilitates that kind of time travel is music, which is why I think music ended up being such an important part of the book. Also, I was reading Proust. He tries, very successfully in some ways, to capture the sense of time passing, the quality of consciousness, and the ways to get around linearity, which is the weird scourge of writing prose." (wikipedia)

• • •

[The only MARLA I recognize]

Conceptually, this is very solid, and the revealer explains perfectly all the circled-square business you've been wrestling with throughout. Didn't exactly get an "aha" from me, but definitely got an approving "oh." I mean, it's straightforward, but accurate, that revealer. Yes, the "time" has to "travel" along its row for the Across clues on that row to make any sense. Moving the "time" isn't nearly as impressive as making sure that even with the "time" in the "wrong" place, the answers in the grid make sense. That is, though the actual answers in the grid, i.e. MAN, PAGE LAYOUT, SHOE RACKS, etc. are essentially unclued, they're still plausible answers. Not gibberish. The concept wasn't hard to grok, and once I got it, filling in the themers was somewhat programmatic—again, as with this past Sunday's puzzle, the grid just straight-up *tells* you where the tricky parts are, eliminating the struggle (and fun) one could have had finding those parts. There's a theoretical version of this puzzle with no circles, and it's very solvable, just ... much harder. But it's Thursday. It's supposed to be hard. But in the interest of accessibility and efficiency (gotta make everything bite-size or you'll lose engagement!), we get the hand-holding assistance of the circles. They do look nice, and they do clearly, visually highlight the gimmick. I just miss the truly Challenging puzzles of yore. I subscribe to other puzzles for that, now. But again, the workmanship here is good, and the theme is very clever. By no means an unenjoyable solving experience.

The upside of the grid design, with the theme compressed toward the center, is that there's lots of real estate before the first themer and after the revealer, and those areas have been put to very good use, with vibrant longer answers that give the grid added color and interest (beyond the theme). UNION CARD MEAT LOVER RAP BATTLE LIES AHEAD, all solid to very good answers. Ditto the long Downs that shoot out of those areas: PIANO ROLLS and WINE TASTER. They've given attention to the marquee answers, made sure they weren't just taking up space. I appreciate that. The shorter fill suffers a bit—it's got some gunk (NRA ISAO NSA NAE SNL SAO INSO ADREP) and is extremely proper-noun heavy, which can get to be a bit of a nuisance after a while. But all of the names were either pretty famous or else very gettable from crosses, so ... yeah, only a bit of a nuisance (KIM and MARLA were the only ones that I struggled with, and MARLA at least rang a bell—definitely watched "The Practice" a quarter century ago). Feels like an eternity since I've seen RAISA Gorbachev, which is surprising given all those super-common letters, but maybe wives of bygone non-U.S. heads of state can't be expected to have a long shelf life. Actually, it's only been three years since RAISA's last appearance, which isn't even the longest RAISA drought of the Shortz era (that would be June '03 to June '07). Not surprisingly, her puzzle heyday was late '80s / early '90s, closer to her ... REIGN? No, that's the wrong word, but you get the idea.

I guess the idea is to make the tricksy puzzles very easy (for the most part), outside of the trick, so this one just hands you SOPHS at 1A: The class of '26 in '24, say, and from there, it's not hard to get good traction. I'm guessing a lot of people had their first "wha?" moment right where I did—when the apparent answer at 19A: Make do (MAN) refused to make any sense. "I know you can MAN your station, MAN the helm ... but woof that is a stretch to get from there to [Make do]!" Indeed. At some point my brain went "oh, it's MANAGE, where the AGE?" and then the circled squares started waving and yelling at me "it's over here!" After that, the puzzle held no mysteries except for what the revealer would be. Only out-and-out mistake I made was ARIA for ACTI (28D: Opera piece) (a very obviously intentional cluing trick, in retrospect, since ARIA is four letters, starts with "A," and actually fits the clue much, much better than the real answer) (boo). I weirdly wanted REEL instead of EPEE at first (60D: Bit of sporting gear with a bell guard), imagining that maybe there was some kind of bell guard on fishing equipment (!?). But I had sense enough not to write that in. Oh, and I thought that what Tupperware did, helpfully, was BURP (it's NEST) (13D: What Tupperware containers do, helpfully). I don't understand that clue on ALAMO (54A: Enterprise Holdings holding), but I assume it has to do with rental car agencies (yes). Is this ugsome corporate clue really worth your little "Holdings holding" sing-songy rhyme? (A: no). 

Don't think any clues need explaining. OPEDS are "takes" in the sense of "opinions" (56D: Takes in the paper?). SLEDS are "zippers" because they "zip" along the snowy ground (69A: Zippers on a snowy day). LAS are [Sixth notes?] because 1. Do 2. Re 3. Mi 4. Fa 5. Sol 6. LA! 7. Ti 8. Do. That was a fun clue for a less-than-fun answer. OK, that's it. Coffee time. Hope you enjoyed this one at least as much as I did. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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