POP CULTURE BOOKS
The Immortalists, by Chloe Benjamin (Putnam, 343 pages)
Tangerine
20% off!
by Christine Mangan (Ecco, Our price $21.59)
After the ‘accident’, the last person Alice Shipley expected to see since arriving in Tangier with her new husband was Lucy Mason.
WENDY WALTER Being “Pickity” Sat, April 14, 3pm
What was it like growing up at Pickity Place - the beloved shop & restaurant deep in the woods of Mason, NH? Joining Wendy will be her parents Judith and David - the founders. Come share your Pickity stories!
Voted #1 sixteen years in a row!
HIPPO | APRIL 5 - 11, 2018 | PAGE 40
669-4533
113893
toadbooks.com
486 Chestnut St., Manchester
119434
Lorden Plaza, Milford, NH | 673-1734 Visit our Bookside Cafe! Find us in Peterborough | 924-3543 And Keene | 352-8815
120459
During the summer of 1969, the four Gold children feel like “something is happening to everyone but them.” Other people are walking on the moon, camping out at Woodstock, and rioting at the nearby Stonewall Inn, but they are confined to their stuffy apartment in their Manhattan neighborhood. So when Daniel, age 11, hears a rumor of a psychic who can tell your fortune down to the exact day you’ll die, the siblings gather their courage and their pocket money and track down the psychic’s apartment. Varya, age 13, doesn’t quite believe that this woman will be able to predict the date of her death, but she is nonetheless reassured when the psychic claims she will die at the ripe old age of 88. When she joins her siblings, Daniel shares his prophesized middle-aged death, but Katya, age 9, and Simon, age 7, are tearful and tight-lipped. They do not anticipate how profoundly their lives will be affected by that fortune-telling. After the opening scene, Chloe Benjamin divides The Immortalists into four sections to follow each of the Gold siblings as they grow up and their paths splinter across the country. The novel becomes an intriguing puzzle of fate versus free will for the reader to unjumble. The question remains throughout the story whether the old woman could truly divine the Golds’ death dates or the alleged foreknowledge influences their decisions. Though the Gold children choose radically different life paths, they each grapple with some variation of faith to help guide them. The Golds’ parents provide a straightforward example of faith: They are devout Jewish immigrants from Hungary who rely on their faith to get them through the hardships of assimilating to a new country, opening their own tailoring business, and raising four children. Simon, a closeted teenager in the late ’70s, isn’t sure he can afford to put his head down and work a menial job like his parents when he might be fated to live a short life, so he decides to place his faith in living life to the fullest instead. Katya, as the only one in the family who knows Simon’s secret, encourages Simon to run away with her to the one place he could really be himself: San Francisco. The first two sections of the book, which focus on Simon and Katya, are entrancing. They both pursue fantastical careers — Simon becomes a dancer and Katya becomes a magician — and their relentless dedication to doing something greater than themselves makes you want to believe
there is some magic in this world. Simon shines with the freedom of being allowed to be an openly gay man. Katya is determined to be the center of her own magic act rather than a prop in a man’s act. However, the reader has the outside knowledge that San Francisco in the early ’80s is on the brink of the AIDS epidemic, so you know Simon and Katya’s dreams will probably take a turn for the worse. Benjamin encapsulates the swelling hope of young adults sucking the marrow out of life and the crushing realities of life’s adversity with equally artful flourishes. Then when you move past Simon and Katya’s perspectives, the practical paths of Daniel and Varya’s lives make you question why the younger siblings entrusted so much belief in the fortuneteller’s words. Daniel is an army doctor who puts his faith in logic. Yet he begins to question the ethics of his profession in a post-9/11 world, since he is the one who administers the health exams to clear prospective soldiers for active duty. Varya is a scientist who works on a study to improve the length and quality of human life, which is interesting considering she is given the longest time frame to live out of any of her siblings. It is revealed that Varya has OCD, and despite her scientific mind she still believes a certain compulsive sequence might be able to save her siblings from the psychic’s prophecy. Varya’s section is the last one in the book, and her part reveals the crux of the novel. “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. And yet, and yet, is it a story if you believe it?” Daniel and Varya view Simon and Katya’s premature deaths as selfish, foolish, and entirely their own faults, yet they can’t quite shake the feeling that maybe there was some truth to the psychic’s predictions after all. Chloe Benjamin’s prose possesses a timelessness of an author who somehow managed to discover time travel with the express purpose of scooping up imagery to write a historically accurate novel. Benjamin transports the reader to San Francisco in the ’80s just as easily as upstate New York in the mid’00s. Though it is clear each background has been painstakingly researched and thoughtfully selected, these decade-specific and city-specific descriptions feel wholly seamless. She encourages belief in magic and logic in alternating breaths, and it is up to you, the reader, to decide the characters’ fates. A— Katherine Ouellette