Fernanda Eberstadt
When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth
Knopf, 448 pp., $ 25
In the sixth chapter of Genesis, the opening four verses record a strange legend according to which the sons of the gods, in the early days of man’s existence on earth, came down from heaven to couple with the daughters of men. The resulting offspring were the Nephilim, a race of giants. This fragment of a pagan myth, illustrating to Hebrew sensibilities an unspeakable depravity, occurs in the Bible as a prologue to the story of the Flood. Fed up with the wickedness of man, God smote the earth with a great deluge, preserving among men only the good Noah and his family as starter-seed for a new stock.
In Fernanda Eberstadt’s third novel, an improbable hero is inspired by the Genesis reading to paint a series of lush, Titian-like tableaux depicting what happens when the sons of heaven meet the daughters of the earth. The setting is New York City between 1989 and 1991. Young Isaac Hooker, in this sequel to Eberstadt’s second novel, Isaac and His Devils, has come to New York from Gilboa, his New Hampshire hometown.
As always, the precocious Isaac is at loose ends, a genius to whom “every subject in the world was a brightly colored cluster bomb, every memory had a fizzing fuse on it waiting to blow up in your face.” The memories — intermittently lifted by Eberstadt from her previous novel — are of a bruising small-town adolescence bedeviled by poor eyesight, partial deafness, clumsy physical bulkiness, a disdainful mother, a frustrated father, and the father’s sudden death after Isaac dropped out of Harvard and moved in with Agnes, his high school math teacher.
Isaac has left Agnes for New York on the supposition that the city to which everyone comes will equip him “to execute his life’s work, whatever it might be.” Three years of odd jobs and scraggly lodgings — punctuated by several frightening months of life on the streets — drain away his vague ambitions to be a writer. In a painting class at a homeless shelter, Isaac stumbles on an unplumbed talent. Doggedly he is applying himself to drawing and painting when a chance encounter with Casey, a former Harvard chum, lands him a job with Casey’s employer, the Aurora Foundation for the Arts.
In the meantime, we have already met Alfred and Dolly Gebler. Dolly, heiress to a Chicago pharmaceutical fortune, is the bankroll and the brains behind Aurora. Alfred, her agreeably dissolute husband of twenty years, is the director. Their marriage is a kind of symbiosis between Dolly’s dutiful austerity and Alfred’s party-animal restlessness. Every day the Geblers go to work at Aurora’s headquarters on Manhattan’s Lower East Side — forty thousand square feet of metal and glass tile rising above the tenements: “all light, with one perfect glass staircase running up it, offices upstairs, and a garage next door.”
Isaac, tramp-like after three years of personal neglect, falls in with the Gebler enterprise just when he is starting to pull out of his funk. By day he works in the crystalline palace of Aurora as a showroom handyman; by night, in his dumpy Hell’s Kitchen apartment above a Turkish nightclub, he works with his paints and charcoal. He paints what he knows: his childhood bedroom, his father, the New Hampshire woods, the stories he grew up with, random biblical imagery.
Dolly at first is taken aback when she views Isaac’s artwork. Her taste is minimalist — “pitilessly new wave,” according to the ironic Alfred: cubes and angles and abstract rationality. Isaac’s dream-pictures seem “willfully reactionary,” turning their back on modernity and “plunging deep into some dark primeval forest.” Yet Dolly falls in love with Isaac’s art and, trusting her own eye to spot genius as well as trend, draws Isaac under her patroness wing.
Eberstadt takes us into the high-rolling dazzle of the New York art world with uncanny perceptiveness: “Manhattan at the fizzle-end of the twentieth century.”
In the Geblers’ universe of board meetings and benefits, exhibitions and black-tie galas, casual infidelities and prodigious posturings, marital discord and sullen children, the unnerving thing about Isaac is that he’s religious. On a lark, though unchurched, he will light a candle in a Franciscan chapel and pray to St. Jude.
When Dolly asks him if he finds consolation in his anachronous faith, Isaac demurs: “Only a spiritual imbecile thinks it’s consolation. It’s a goad . . . torment, mostly, because the doubts are so unremitting, so unmanning.” For his series of paintings on the sons of heaven and the daughters of the earth, Isaac’s ambition is to “show how revelation impinged on ordinary life, to cast light on those little rents in the veil of the everyday through which we escape into, catch glimpses of the Other World. Of God.”
By coincidence, Isaac’s grandiloquent rumination is a fair statement of Fernanda Eberstadt’s undertaking. The glimpses come between the lines time and again on the pages of this extraordinary novel — in Isaac’s nagging conscience, for example, or in Dolly’s brusque affection, or in Alfred’s surprise at feeling envious of a friend who has returned to the practice of his Jewish faith.
There is also the sheer intricacy of relations among the characters. At one point, as he is drawn into the Gebler family, it occurs to Isaac that Dolly and Alfred’s “seemingly incongruous union” is in fact well conceived. It shows in the couple’s three “graceful gawky children, with bits of each parent folded into them and sticking out at unexpected angles.” Dolly’s unyielding earnestness comes through in their daughter Johnny, but “egg- whipped and luminized by Alfred’s optimism, his appetite, his chatterbox goofiness.”
This is a novel to savor and to mull over, crackling with intelligence and brilliant imagery: good-humored, buoyant, deeply unsettling.
John R. Dunlap teaches English and classics at Santa Clara University.
