The Immortalists

Starred review from October 23, 2017
In her second novel, Benjamin (The Anatomy of Dreams) constructs an imaginative and satisfying family saga. In 1969, the four rambunctious Gold children, Simon, Klara, Daniel, and Varya, visit a psychic on Manhattan’s Lower East Side who predicts the date each of them will die. The novel then follows how the siblings deal with news of their expiration dates. In the late ’70s, Klara and Simon, the youngest, run off to San Francisco, where the closeted Simon becomes a dancer and Klara a magician and stage illusionist who believes she can commune with the spirits of dead relatives. In 2006, Daniel, a married army doctor based in Kingston, N.Y., learns that the psychic who foretold their fates is a con artist wanted by the FBI, and attempts to track her down. In 2010, Varya, the eldest Gold, is a longevity researcher who feels closest to the rhesus monkeys she uses for her experiments. But one day, a journalist named Luke interviews her and, in the process, changes the course of her life. The author has written a cleverly structured novel steeped in Jewish lore and the history of four decades of American life. The four Gold siblings are wonderful creations, and in Benjamin’s expert hands their story becomes a moving meditation on fate, faith, and the family ties that alternately hurt and heal. Agent: Margaret Riley King, WME Entertainment.

Maggie Hoffman narrates this thought-provoking story with a straightforward delivery. She gives the mother, Gertie, a perfect nagging Jewish mother voice and uses pace, tone, and inflection effectively to bring the other characters to life. After the prologue, which finds the four Gold siblings, ages 7 to 13, sneaking off to visit a fortune-teller who tells them the dates of their deaths, the story breaks into four sections that explore how each sibling lives his or her life with that knowledge. There is little interweaving to connect the siblings' lives in adulthood, but the individual stories give a look at four distinctive personalities and their reliance on fate. N.E.M. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine