The Immortalists
by Chloe Benjamin
G.P. Putnam’s Sons. 346 pages, $26.
IT’S A QUESTION as old as Greek tragedy (or older): what part does fate play in our lives? What if you could somehow know your ultimate fate? Would that knowledge change the way you lived your life? Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalist takes these questions and gives them a clever, modern spin. Simon, Klara, Daniel, and Varya are four siblings growing up in New York City. One day in 1969 they pay a visit to a fortune-teller who seemingly has the ability to predict the precise date on which each of them will die. The children listen in shock as each one is told the terrible news, separately. Each reacts differently to the news, and the four sections of the book are essentially each sibling’s way of dealing with this knowledge.
The first section belongs to Simon, who refuses to tell anyone the exact date of his predicted demise. All that the siblings can manage to pry from him is that he expects to die at a very young age. Simon is gay, winds up moving to San Francisco in the early 1980s, and—you guessed it—contracts AIDS and dies a premature death. Simon’s death raises the stakes for the rest of the siblings but also introduces a certain ambiguity: Did the fortune-teller really predict the future, or is it possible that Simon consciously or unconsciously hastened his own demise because he genuinely believed that he was destined to die young?
With this question unresolved, the next section takes up Klara’s story and provides an explanation for the title of the book. Klara is something of a clairvoyant herself, and also something of a magician and acrobat, and the death-defying spin that she introduces into her act, which she labels “The Immortalist,” highlights the major themes of the book: How do we manage risk as we spin through the great uncertainty that is life? Also, how do we employ the special gifts and talents with which each of us has been blessed? In Klara’s case, her obsession with the fortune-teller’s wisdom could be responsible for her risky course of action, rendering the prediction a self-fulfilling prophecy. Again, the siblings are left wondering what made her fate inevitable, fate itself or a surrender to the prediction.
The third section is Daniel’s, and here is where some of the problems with this book become apparent. The biggest pitfall with a premise such as this, clever though it is, is that the narrative unfolds with a certain predictability, like the seasons unfolding year after year. An overly determined plot device such as this runs the risk of reducing the characters to chess pieces, shuffled around strictly in order to fill out the rest of the narrative. It doesn’t help that Benjamin’s prose is often short and choppy, or that she tells each story in the third person, a device that has the effect of distancing the characters from the reader, preventing us from entering into the characters’ thoughts and perspectives.
Circling back to Simon’s section, which nicely illustrates this fault, we find Benjamin often tossing out details and locations, such as: “In June, the Castro blooms. Prop 6 pamphlets drift through the street like leaves.” While such time-stamps help provide a reference point, they do little more than that, and they never really make you feel like you’re part of Simon’s inner life. What’s more, someone who didn’t know what Prop 6 was would be clueless.
Near the end of the book, just as Benjamin’s structure seems in imminent danger of collapsing under its own conceit, Varya’s section comes along. In picking a name like Varya for the final sibling, Benjamin must have in mind Chekhov’s heroine in The Cherry Orchard—the sister who sees everything changing, but who can do nothing about it. Varya is the longest-lived of the four and must be the closest to the author’s heart, because, with Varya, the author begins at last to ask the larger questions that have not been asked so far:
What do you want? Luke asked her, and if Varya had answered him honestly, she would have said this: To go back to the beginning. She would tell her thirteen-year-old self not to visit the woman. To her twenty-five-year old self: Find Simon, forgive him. She would tell herself to take care of Klara. … She’d tell herself she would die, they all would. She would tell herself to pay attention to the smell of Klara’s hair, the feel of Daniel’s arms as he reached down to hug her. … She’d tell herself that what she really wanted was not to live forever, but to stop worrying.
With this kind of introspection in the final section, and a few other very smart moments, Benjamin brings the reader full circle, to the very heart of life’s mysteries: What’s it all about? How should I live my life? In the end, The Immortalists becomes quite touching and unforgettable. It surprises you, as life itself often does.
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