What would you do if you knew when you will die?
Author Chloe Benjamin explores an age-old topic — the power of prophecy to shape a person’s life — with fresh eyes in her new novel, “The Immortalists.” While flawed, Benjamin’s tale is propulsive and colorful, capturing moving truths about the way we handle the knowledge that we all eventually die.
The premise that sets “The Immortalists” in motion is brilliant and simple. Four siblings — Varya, Daniel, Klara and Simon Gold — seek out a seer who tells them each, privately, the day she claims they will die. The rest of the book consists of novellas focusing on each of the children as they approach the appointed date. Benjamin’s premise unearths many profound questions. Is the seer a con, or can she really tell the future? How does a date with death shape the trajectory of a life? To what extent does this knowledge become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Is fate inescapable? Is there free will? What should we do with the time we have?
Benjamin doesn’t answer these questions. Instead she mulls them with her readers, examining various explanations for what happens to the Gold children. And she does this mulling in the most unexpected environs. Each novella takes place in a vivid world — the clubs of San Francisco at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, dimly lit stages where death-defying magic shows are performed, the sterile laboratories of a Silicon Valley anti-aging research center. Here’s Benjamin’s description of a gay ballet corps in the late 1970s, where Simon, the youngest Gold, learns to dance as he embraces his identity:
It is beautiful masochism, what he just did, more difficult even than the half marathon he won at fifteen: hills, thunder of feet and Simon in the midst of it, gasping down the Hudson River waterfront. He fingers the black slippers, which he shoved in his back pocket. They seem to taunt him. He must become like the other male dancers: expert, majestic, invincibly strong.
Benjamin does a credible job of conjuring the Gold family, and their ties to each other. Their deaths, one by one, land hard. She is keenly interested in the effects of a sibling’s death on the others. How does that event change the way the other siblings view their own eventual demises? Benjamin weaves these complex shifts in her characters’ points of view with simple prose.
This is not to say the book has no flaws. Daniel’s tale fails to capture the vivacity of Simon’s, Klara’s and Varya’s stories. His fateful decision feels like it arrives out of the blue, forced and unlikely. Even his job — as a physician deciding whether military recruits are healthy enough to join — falls flat. His story feels a little retrofitted to lead to a preordained conclusion.
There’s also the inexplicable presence of several characters who seem to serve no purpose. The best example of this problem is the character of Eddie O’Donoghue, an FBI agent who shows up repeatedly but seems superfluous.
These flaws, however, are overshadowed by the power of the rest of the novel and especially by its moving last section, which focuses on Varya late in her life. Varya has been profoundly transformed by her siblings — and not in positive ways. Her soul is crabbed and damaged. “It was like watching the power incrementally turning off throughout a neighborhood: certain parts of her went dark, then others.”
Benjamin’s portrait of Varya is strange and fresh, dark and deep. She does not shy away from the power of loss to change the very core of a person. As we learn more about Varya’s work and her history, the book feels like it is going to take an even darker turn. Benjamin builds suspense.
And then Benjamin does something lovely. She lets a bit of hope filter in at just the right moment. Benjamin holds out hope for redemption and change and love, even after surviving tragedy. She does this without diminishing Varya’s pain. She is a person whose lights have blinked out, to use her own metaphor, and Benjamin allows a few of them to dimly light up again. Not all of them, but a few. And it feels like a miracle.
Trine Tsouderos is a freelancer.