That death gives life meaning is a cliché, but it’s at least as plausible to say that it takes meaning away. Like the old joke about not wanting to know the ending of the movie Titanic in advance, everyone’s life heads toward the same destination, regardless of the road taken to get there. “After hundreds of years,” reflects Rachel, the immortal heroine of Eternal Life, “these details that most people spent their lives exploring were only details. Every man was finally just a man, then bones, then dust.” So why do anything at all, if it’s all going to end the same way?
Eternal Life isn’t Dara Horn’s first brush with death. Big-hearted and erudite, her books have tried more than once before to depict what it means to be a finite creature with eternal ambitions. In her 2006 novel The World to Come, a story of art theft widens to include a whole family history and eventually the afterlife itself, where the dead and the yet-to-be-born observe the living. In A Guide for the Perplexed (2013), the programmer heroine builds Genizah, a kind of digital memory palace. In these works, different timelines interact, nothing is as linear as you might expect, the universe is full of twins and serendipitous forgeries and substitutions, and the world itself is not wholly real.
Her newest novel returns to some of these themes and devices, but this time, Rachel and Elazar, its principal characters, are obsessed with death precisely because they cannot die. They live their lives over and over, marrying mortals and having children, then watching their spouses and children age and die. When they’ve stuck around for too long, they set themselves on fire, rise up new from the ashes, and start again.
Horn gives full weight to the horror, but also the mundanity, of the situation. Rachel experiences her unending life largely through her children, in whom she can’t help but notice repeating patterns and types. It’s her children that got her into this situation, too. About 2,000 years ago, give or take, when she was the daughter of a scribe and he the son of the high priest, they met and began a secret affair. Because they could not marry, Rachel eventually married Zakkai, a man of her father’s choosing—but she continued to see Elazar. The secret lovers eventually have a child, attributed to Zakkai. When the child falls dangerously ill, the high priest tells them that Rachel and Elazar can save his life, but only if they are willing to cut a deal: he lives but they can’t die.
Not too long after this, Zakkai is tricked into treasonous action against the Roman government and executed. Rachel, suspecting Elazar’s involvement, is unable to forgive him. And the child, being saved from only one death, eventually dies an old man. (Cutting any kind of deal with death is never the bargain it seems at the time.)
For reasons readily understandable to most mortals, this shared past both irrevocably links and divides Rachel and Elazar; they once shared a great love and a child, and now they share a condition and a secret. But they are also trapped in an emotional back-and-forth that might as well be scripted in advance, with professions of love on Elazar’s part matched with distrust on Rachel’s.
Unlike Rachel, Elazar suffers no great anguish over his own immortality. He mourns his mortal children, but he’s not haunted by their deaths. While Rachel experiences her own life as shapeless, Elazar does not; Rachel is his reason for living and would be even if he could die. His love for Rachel will never dim, and he will follow her from lifetime to lifetime, only wanting to be with her for eternity. It’s Rachel whose feelings for Elazar are conflicted, who feels both love and anger, who tries to disappear into each new life, and who longs to die.
But in the 21st century, it’s not going to be so easy for Rachel to disappear into a new life the next time. The world, as Elazar explains to her, is becoming more and more complicated; thanks to things like Social Security numbers and credit cards, emerging into the world as freshly born 18-year-olds won’t be simple. And on top of this, Hannah, Rachel’s granddaughter by her most recent marriage, announces that she’s on a team of scientists trying to figure out how to help people live forever, a project that fills Rachel, initially, with horror.
But if Hannah can isolate the causes of aging and death, Rachel reasons, can’t she also help people to die? And if Rachel can safely let Hannah in on her secret, might she be able to explain why it’s good that people die?
This is a little too much for a fairly slender novel to juggle, and Eternal Life doesn’t quite have the magic of Dara Horn’s previous books. The mechanisms of its plot can be clunky, too much has to be elaborately explained, and in the end it reads more like an overlong short story than a complete novel. As an attempt to turn the drama of mortality inside out, it’s ambitious, but not entirely successful. And the drama of Elazar’s irresistible force to Rachel’s immovable wall gets tiresome.
Despite these flaws, Eternal Life is frequently moving, especially in its early chapters as Rachel remembers her long life, the sorrows that cut deeply even after centuries. “What reasons,” she wonders, “are there for being alive?”
It’s not an easy question to answer, and most of the answers rest on the unspoken assumption that the question is why we stay alive in the face of death, not why we stay alive in the face of life. Sacrifice becomes “heavy labor cast into a void,” the pursuit of joy causes you to wonder “why you had bothered.” Then there’s the love of God—that true infinitude that remains beyond her reach—but though Rachel has more reason than most to believe, that belief can’t give her life meaning.
If Eternal Life falters, it’s at least in part because Rachel’s struggles can’t be solved by death. If they could be, we wouldn’t understand them. When she tries to explain to Hannah that nothing can mean anything without death, it’s hard to hear it as anything other than wishful thinking. It’s not living forever that’s Rachel’s problem, after all—it’s that other people die. It’s having enough time to realize that the reasons for being alive aren’t as obvious as you might think, that they will unravel if given enough time and enough other passing lives and loves and attachments.
What reasons are there for being alive? In a sense, Dara Horn’s other novels do a better job of answering that question. Perhaps death isn’t real, and neither is life as we know it; perhaps we are surrounded and sustained by eternity, and by love, and incorporated into a complex and beautiful story that we could never ourselves anticipate, playing roles we’ll never really understand. Perhaps we can only feel that eternity when we know we’ll have to leave the stage. But we don’t, at least in Horn’s books, leave the stage for nothing. We leave it for reality, for more life. At the risk of sounding circular, the meaning of life isn’t, indeed can’t be, death; it’s life.
