The Girl, the Gold Watch, & Everything

I'm quite fond of this book and would like to give it 4 stars, but I don't reread it often enough to give it more than 3.

MacDonald had a long and successful career writing mundane thrillers, but just this once he had a science-fiction daydream (wish-fulfillment fantasy?) and decided to make a novel out of it. The protagonist, Kirby Winter, has been left a gold watch (but no money) by his late, rich uncle, but he has no idea that the watch is anything but a watch, because his uncle didn't see fit to tell him.

Winter is a pleasant, earnest, good-looking young man who nevertheless fails embarrassingly with women, and is even more embarrassed when unjustly accused of hiding a very large amount of his uncle's wealth. He blunders around through seven and a half painful chapters, pursued by police and criminals alike, before accidentally discovering that the gold watch is a special kind of time machine. After that, he still has serious problems, but at least the watch gives him some hope of being able to deal with them. He goes through some character development in the process, and discovers a woman who loves him, much to his delight.

I think it's the initial seven and a half chapters of mundane blundering that make me curiously reluctant to reread this book; and I suspect that most sf authors wouldn't have the patience to wait so long before uncovering the secret. However, MacDonald was accustomed to writing entire mundane novels with nothing science-fictional or fantastic about them, so I suppose those initial chapters seemed business as usual to him.