Eternal Life by Dara Horn

She had done well, she thought, in this version.  "Version" was the word she used when thinking of it--nusach, the liturgical term, like a melodic variation on a theme.  That's what they were, these different versions: different tones, different moods, melancholic, joyful, anxious, calm, hectic, fast, slow.  This version was one of the best, the happiest, which was why she hadn't wanted to leave.  But she couldn't stay forever.

Rachel is pushing eighty.  Her life is quite happy: she runs a gem business, and she has several children and grandchildren.  Most are quite successful.  Her granddaughter Hannah, for example, is researching telomeres, the little caps on the end of our chromosomes that may hold the secret to extending human life.  Her son Rocky, however, gives her trouble; he's one of those people that just can't seem to get their life together.  Recently he's been getting into that trendy business among such folks: mining Bitcoin.  But Rachel has a secret of her own--thanks to a vow she made to save the life of her son two millennia ago, she's actually immortal.  Every few generations, she regenerates by burning, and must leave the family she's created behind.  Through all these lives she is stalked by an old lover, her first child's father, who sees their immortal lives as an opportunity to really be together forever, and to whom she is equally, dangerously, drawn.

There's a lot to like about Dara Horn's Eternal Life.  I'm a sucker for fictional representations of historical folks, and although I am not incredibly familiar with the Jewish history of the destruction on the Second Temple, this is an especially clever one.  Rachel's first son Yochanan, the one she saves by her vow, is the Jewish scholar Yochanan ben Zakkai, who, according to legend, is smuggled out of the besieged city of Jerusalem to beg with the Romans to spare, not the temple or the city, but the Torah.  This act, the preservation of the word of God, finds its analog in Rocky and the blockchain record that makes crypto mining possible.

This is a very clever connection, or an extremely goofy one, depending on your perspective.  Much in the novel is goofier--like Rachel's ancient lover Elazar getting into Twitter fights about the value of immortality, where he claims to have been flayed by the Inquisition, punctuated by the words "epic fail!"  But its cleverness is a weakness as much as a strength.  (What are the odds that Rachel's granddaughter would be one of the world's leading anti-death researchers?)  The conclusion especially falls into place a little too neatly

 But the novel's biggest weakness, I thought, was its lack of breadth.  It's not that it's too short, necessarily, but that it feels pared down in a way that doesn't work for a story of eternal life.  (Think about Orlando--a novel that isn't very long, but somehow manages to convince you that Orlando has lived a very long time.)  Rachel alludes to her many children--her sixtieth son, her forty-second daughter--and claims that watching them die, over and over, is the great trauma of her eternal life.  But for the novel's purposes there are really only two time periods: Rachel's first life in the era of the Second Temple and the present day.  The intervening years, while not a mystery, fail to establish a sense of reality.  Nor did the prose, which struck me as relatively blond, seem matched to the subject.  I didn't really think that Eternal Life really lived up to the promise of its first page:

If her father had described it--it was his job to write, or at least to copy, though he liked to add his own details--he might have written: These are the generations of Rachel, keeper of vows, who bargained with God and lived.  If her son had written it--her first son, the wise one, the reason for everything that followed--he would have put it differently.  If all the heavens were parchment, and all the seas ink, such would not suffice to record the days of Rachel, whose years are no more than an eyeblink to the Master of the World.  If her twentieth son had written it--he was a panderer, a bootlicker, but that had been worth something then--he would have sprinkled it with rose petals til it reeked.  O mother of thousands, she who escaped the sword; most loved, most honored, most blessed of the lord!  Or something equally trite.

This suggests to me a novel that might have been, a novel that was really interested in recording those multiplicity of voices, and showing how Rachel has become a product of each nusach that she's lived.  But for all its inventiveness, and some very moving meditations on life and God and the problem of death, it all felt a little too of the moment for me.

The Postmortal by Drew Magary

“I’ve always known it was a lie. You cannot hide from the world. It will find you. It always does. And now it has found me. My split second of immortality is over. All that’s left now is the end, which is all any of us really has.”

“Who wants to live forever?” - Queen

I struggled to find a piece of prose to headline this review, because The Postmortal isn’t really built around strong prose. It’s got very little style, beyond its unique structure, which intersperses a first-person narrative with blog posts, news stories, and television transcripts and is sometimes a little clumsy or overfamiliar. It’s also not really character-based—outside of two or three characters, most of the cast was thinly sketched. It also has serious third-act problems. In spite of all that, I can’t help but qualify it as a success, largely due to its setting, a world in which science has conquered death.

The novel focuses on John Ferrell, an average guy who chooses to have his physical state frozen at the age of twenty-nine. Author Drew Magary follows Ferrell through the next 60 years, as the face of the world changes in light of mankind’s newfound immortality. Ferrell changes along with the world, gradually transforming from an average Joe who just happens to be immortal into a cynical jerk into a government-sponsored “End Specialist”—essentially a euthanasiast. In spite of the novel’s combination first-person/epistolary, it sustains some serious momentum throughout, and, even when events strain credulity, it maintains an emotional core that directs the twists, including a particularly Whedonesque one near the midpoint, directly at the gut.

Magary starts from a simple premise—what if, barring disease or violent death, we could live forever?—and extrapolates from it a worldwide culture which is surprisingly believable. Following the cure from its pre-legal stages all the way to a nuclear apocalypse, Magary takes the long view, speculating on how immortality would affect religion, marriage, healthcare, politics and personal behavior. There’s very little that doesn’t receive at least cursory treatment, and Magary’s conclusions seem logical enough. As it turns out, this is enough to sustain the whole enterprise. Even when things take a turn toward action-movie clichés, John maintains a sense of humanity that grounds the sensational events surrounding him. There’s thought-provoking material in The Postmortal, ranging from the things everyone has thought about—won’t everyone I know die, is immortality really something desirable—to the extremely unsettling, as in a transcribed interview with a woman who injected her baby girl with the cure at 9 months, rendering her an eternal infant.

However, it’s not all sunshine. In spite of some good moments, including the ending, the last third of the novel, where Ferrell (spoiler) hooks up with the most beautiful woman in the world after saving her life, feels a lot like shallow wish fulfillment and somewhat undercuts the rest of the novel’s willingness to pull the rug out from under the reader just when things started seeming too familiar. Still, none of these problems took me out of the story too much. The themes were just too universal, too primal, and the world too well conceived, to be derailed by plot contrivances. Who waits forever anyway?

Jitterbug Perfume-Tom Robbins

Structure has been a recent focus of my reading. How a story unfolds is increasingly more important, and when a story is layered with four story lines I feel I’ve got a book that is worth getting excited about.

“Breathe properly, stay curious. And eat your beets.” This is the guiding principal of immortal life according to Alobar. But there is more to living a thousand years: take baths, have a lot of sex, and choose life. Alobar is king, but as soon as his age begins to show he will be killed out of the fear that the weakness of the king will bring weakness to the Slavic community in the year 900. Alobar chooses to not accept death as a part of life and so begins the epic journey of a king that will become a janitor.

Most develop an obsession with beets while reading Jitterbug. Alobar attributes his strength of mind to the bloody vegetable. On his cross-Asian trek to escape death and discover the secrets of immortality, Alobar meets the goat god Pan, the Lamas monks of the Himalaya, and the Bandaloop. Already not aging, he finds Kudra who has chosen to run away from her life and live as a widow instead of dying in the funeral pyre where her husband’s body will be consumed (lovely Hindu tradition). “From the thick parabolas of her eyelids to the pronounced balls of her now bare feet, she was nonstop curve…” Kudra is obsessed with smells, her childhood was spent helping her family sell incense, but her adult life has been as the wife of a rope maker. The only thing these two have in common is the choice of living over dying, but together they become soul mates.

Every 10 pages or so, Robbins mentions sex. The encounters with Pan are especially vivid, but Kudra knows Kama Sutra from her marriage. Sex. It’s exciting, funny, creative, life giving. This book is dirty, absurd, and lovely.

The other three plot lines revolve around perfume in three cities: Seattle, New Orleans, and Paris. Priscilla is a genius waitress/chemist trying to recreate the scent found in a blue bottle. M. Devalier is a perfumer interested in creating a new scent focusing on pungent Jamaican Jasmine flowers (Bingo Pajama is a street flower salesman with bees swarming around his head as accompaniment). And the Lefever family is a fragrance power company in Paris.  The connections are obvious and this may be the weakest part of the book, but it’s told in small pieces between the epic of Alobar and Kudra. I looked forward to the breaks from immortality, but that theme comes back with Priscilla and her love affair with the Irish Dr. Wiggs Dannyboy.

I like the challenge of multiple perspectives (I want a second reading of The Savage Detectives after reading this) and the ultimate unity of all four stories coming together for a complete feeling. Jitterbug feels done when you finish it, but everything isn’t wrapped up. There is no answer to immortality, not everybody gets what they want, but the perfume has settled.

Tom Robbins’ style is not for everybody. He’s crude most of the time, funny all the time, and flirting with deeper philosophical questions throughout. The wild metaphors and puns can touch readers the wrong way. His writing has a sense of magic realism that can be compared to some worlds created by Kelly Link. This is the first I've read by him, I know I’ll read more.

Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt

One of the good things about my new job (high-volume babysitter) is that it gives me an excuse to revisit some of the classics of Young Adult literature, under the pretense that I am trying to decide what to have my class read. You and I know the truth: I love sub-200 page books with simple vocabulary and happy endings.

Anyhow, I begin today with Tuck Everlasting, a book I read on the train in about one day, though the fact that Alexis Bledel was on the cover got me some strange looks. I don't care. I love Alexis Bledel.

What struck me about Tuck Everlasting was how tight it was--it makes sense of course, that YA authors must be a lot more sparing with their words than adult novelists, but the market is so flooded with sprawling, unfocused tomes (and here a namecheck to the recently deceased David Foster Wallace and Infinite Jest seems appropriate), that I am especially appreciative of the talent that is required to mold a compelling story into something that is brief and uncomplicated enough to keep the interest of a middle schooler.

But the problem I have with Tuck Everlasting is that it seems to take a relatively simplistic view toward its main theme: death. The story is--if you were the odd child to have never read it--about a family named Tuck, composed of a mother, father, and two (seemingly) older sons who, some eighty years prior to the setting of the novel, discovered a spring in a forest which bestowed upon them eternal life. They have long acted as keepers of this secret spring, ensuring that no one else drinks from it--because, as they describe, this seeming benefit is really a curse that makes it impossible to create lasting human relationships with anyone but their immediate relatives--that is, until a young girl named Winnie Foster complicates their existence by stumbling upon the spring. It's quite a good yarn, though it seems like only a tiny fraction of what an adult novelist might do with the same situation.

But you can see how, thematically, this might be used as a platform from which to introduce middle-school-aged children to the concept of death. I cannot help but respect this goal; it takes quite a bit of bravery to attempt to distill one of literature's most persistent and complex themes into a presentation that is so very accessible. But what Tuck Everlasting wishes to say about death--that it is as necessary a part of the human experience as life, and that the Tuck family suffers in their lack of it--is something that any sufficiently contemplative adult has already considered.

I am not saying that Tuck Everlasting doesn't do a commendable job of presenting death to its audience, but I am saying that it is not a book--like the one I am to post on next--that I feel can be appreciated on an adult level as well. It is a book written for a time when a child's fear of death, still a faraway and unapproachable thing, can be allayed by pithy philosophizing. In truth, as these children will learn, into adulthood death remains present, frightening, and ill-understood no matter how much we understand the salience of the Tucks' pro-death sermonizing. How many minds of how many generations have set themselves to understanding death through art, literature, religion and philosophy, and have we truly ever come closer than Shakespeare, who called it an "undiscovered country?"

And then I think of these students of mine, who live in a neighborhood of New York City that, while not as impoverished or plagued by crime as Harlem, the southern Bronx, or Bedford-Stuyvesant, certainly has a higher incidence of violence than the areas in which any of us live. Tuck Everlasting may have made my young self feel more at ease about death, but would it seem patronizing to a student who has witnessed the untimely death of a friend or a relative? Much better, I think, would be Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia, a much more mimetic book about a young student dealing with death.