The last sibling, primate researcher Varya, is hardest to embrace – not surprisingly given that her hermetic OCD-fostered avoidance of risk means she has survived rather than truly lived.īut The Immortalists remains a boundlessly moving inquisition into mortality, grief and passion.
Peaking in their youth and beauty, Simon and Klara are the dazzlers here, so the emotional piquancy of the story is frontloaded.Īfter Klara, Daniel is pulled from middle-aged suburban malaise into the hunt for the Romany fraud ring that spawned their fortune teller, ending up in some hackneyed thriller-style jeopardy. Her evocation of how Aids scythed across gay America in the early 1980s feels synthetic compared with Edmund White or Armistead Maupin.
Like Klara in her early shows, Benjamin is prone to stumbles. The novel garners the doomy sonority of Greek tragedy, even though the various parts are uneven. After Simon leaps into the late 1970s San Francisco gay scene “like a dog into water”, he seizes upon sex, drugs, ballet and ultimately romantic love with an urgent joy, but the “gay cancer” claims him barely out of his teens.īenjamin poses the same question for each Gold: will they die on the augured date because it is their destiny, or because the prediction draws them into an altered pattern of life choices?
Turning to each sibling in the order of their deaths, the novel sweeps through the ensuing half-century towards the present day.
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