The end in sight
Death comes for us all, we know that — in theory. But Chloe Benjamin’s second novel, “The Immortalists,” imagines what happens when that truth moves from hazy inevitability to pressing reality. In 1969, the four Gold siblings, Varya, Klara, Simon and Daniel, steal away to Hester Street in New York, where a fortune teller tells each of them the day they’ll die. It’s a premise that carries the whiff of a thought experiment or a question on a personality quiz: Would you want to know the date of your death?
So much of the book’s plot follows from that portentous set-up by necessity that its progress can feel dutiful, almost programmatic. (Indeed, “The Immortalists” TV rights have already been acquired by production studio the Jackal Group.) After the visit to the fortune-teller, the book breaks into four sections, each beginning with a sibling coping with another family member’s death and most ending with that sibling hurtling toward their own — in exactly the order and time the woman on Hester Street predicted. Simon, the youngest, is the first to go at 20, dying of AIDS in 1982 after a few uninhibited years as a gay man in the Castro. Klara, a magician who works her way up to her own Vegas show, is next. Then there’s Daniel, a military doctor who stayed close to their mother, Gertie, and Varya, the eldest, who conducts research on monkeys at an anti-aging institute.
Naming the precise day of one’s death does something funny to the characters, though: It actually magnifies their fear and uncertainty. (We learn Varya’s prediction early on — Jan. 21, 2044 — and its starkness on the page sent a small shudder through this reader.) With an endpoint so clearly specified, it’s easy to slip into nihilism: “Most adults claim not to believe in magic, but Klara knows better. Why else would anyone play at permanence — fall in love, have children, buy a house — in the face of all the evidence there’s no such thing?”
The question then becomes how to best live one’s life, and the lessons are a smidge too pat. The endless search for certainty, Benjamin tells us, is folly. Daniel, a hard-headed atheist, aggressively tries to control his own fate, Oedipuslike, and meets the bloodiest end. Varya lives an attenuated life, restricting her caloric intake because her research suggests that it could extend her life span. But Simon, though he succumbs young to a horrifying disease, takes the prophecy the right way: He lives for himself, takes risks and dies content. A life fretting about death is a life wasted, Benjamin concludes, and uncertainty isn’t only something to be borne — it’s freeing, if you can accept it. “They don’t want cages and food pellets,” someone tells Varya, talking about her monkey test subjects. “They want light, play, heat, texture — danger!” And the same is true, evidently, for humans.
Benjamin is also interested in the ways human minds grapple with the unknown: The Golds’ father is devoutly Jewish, but his children discard his faith in favor of their own, in science or magic or themselves. Each is an invisible ordering principle that makes life understandable and bearable, that puts uncertainty into perspective — just like fiction itself, Benjamin implies. But she equates ritual, magic, fiction and faith: “Varya has had enough therapy to know that she’s telling herself stories. She knows her faith — that rituals have power, that thoughts can change outcomes or ward off misfortune — is a magic trick: fiction, perhaps, but necessary for survival.” The result is diffuse; by trying to tackle all these ideas at once, the book’s gestures are sweeping but shallow.
The characters’ daily lives are more sharply observed, as the Golds cope with the corrosive guilt that a sibling’s death awakens, and grief that reverberates through multiple lives. But the book is shot through with memento mori, distracting reminders of Benjamin’s authorial presence. When Simon plays Icarus in his San Francisco ballet company, “he is grateful when Robert removes [his wings], even though this means that they have melted, and that Simon, as Icarus, will die.” When Varya brings her mother lilacs: “The glass is too short. One flower keels dumbly over the side. They won’t be alive much longer.” And the book’s language feels studied and almost too proper (“the dog promptly produced a pellet-sized turd of which Mrs. Blumenstein did not dispose”), and can veer into awkwardness that yanks the reader away from the story’s action: “In 1969, though, they are still a unit, yoked as if it isn’t possible to be anything but.” The Golds end up coming off not as real people but as richly described case studies of how not to live.
“It’s the most painful thorn in our side, this not-knowing,” Benjamin has written, on life’s open-endedness. “We forget that most questions in this world — the ones that really matter — are impossible to answer completely.” But “The Immortalists” bears marks of obsessive manicuring. The novel self-consciously tries to deliver essential truths about life without outright saying them, but it doesn’t quite let its readers do the open-ended work of piecing those truths together — betraying, perhaps, a mind that hasn’t fully embraced uncertainty itself.
Chelsea Leu is a researcher and writer at Wired. Email: books@sfchronicle.com