Dara Horn, Eternal Life, and Kevin McIlvoy, Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels

If you had lived for 2000 years and knew that you wouldn’t (couldn’t) die, how would you spend your days? (Not in a Groundhog Day way, but with a life where each day could potentially “count.”) What would be meaningful to you if you were immortal? Or, if you knew that you had very little time left to live, what would matter most to you? How would you see the world? In Dara Horn’s novel Eternal Life, a woman trades the possibility of her own death for a miracle that saves her son’s life. Through her centuries of life, first in Roman-occupied Jerusalem and then in a variety of places around the world, including in the U.S. in the 21st century, she gets very, very tired of being reborn over and over and especially of watching generations of husbands and children die. In Kevin McIlvoy’s Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels, a writer facing his imminent death breaks his perceptions, anecdotes, and secrets into tiny stories and prose poems, seeing the world in glittering, exact detail, longing even for its grotesqueries.

Eternal Life

Eternal Life begins, “Either everything matters, or everything is an outrageous waste of time,” and before we get to the moment where it all matters, Horn captures how much her protagonist, Rachel, doesn’t want to leave her current family and start over (literally burning herself up when it’s no longer possible to hide how long she’s lived, and then regenerating as the eighteen year old she was when she first made the pact that led to her immortality). By the time the book starts, she longs to die. She is possessed by all her memories, and it never becomes less devastating for her to lose each new family. (This is less depressing than it sounds, because we’re rooting for her to learn to accept loss on a grand scale and so to embrace life, no matter how long it goes on.)

As a spokesman for the cause of life, her lover, Elazor, the father of the child she gave up mortality for, comes to find her in various lives. He wants her to stop dwelling on the losses, disasters, endings:

“There must have been other times when you heard things about someone you left behind, good things, beginnings.”

“Of course,” she said. She remembered subscribing to synagogue newsletters in New York years ago, searching for great-grandchildren’s birth announcements. Occasionally she spotted one, though she couldn’t always be sure. Then there were the officially successful children, the ones whose stories reached her wherever she went. There was the daughter in Neapolis, who, at thirteen, had the bizarre idea of tying moldy bread to her brother’s leg where he had gashed it at the foundry. We want the skin to grow back, Mama, she had explained, and everything grows on old bread, so isn’t it worth trying? It certainly can’t hurt! Decades later in Rome, busy with new children, Rachel still heard legends about the woman healer of Neapolis, the miracle worker people traveled for days to see, the one who could cure any illness and who twice brought people back from the dead in the marketplace by breathing into their mouths and pumping their hearts for them with her hands. Rachel’s thirty-fourth son wrote a monumental code of religious law whose manuscript copies soon appeared in every community from Babylonia to France; wherever she heard someone cite it during a long sabbath meal, the world gleamed with unearthly light. For decades Rachel brought multiple copies of the novels written by her sixty-third son, giving them as gifts to his half-siblings. She listened to recordings of concertos played by another daughter, a violinist, until the wax cylinders were damaged beyond repair. Rachel often fantasized that death meant encountering answers, a revelation of the purpose of being alive. But instead she had the smaller revelations, moments when the curtain between the potential and the actual was suddenly pulled back, bathing the world in light. Those moments were fleeting, incremental. In the congregational newsletters where she hunted for births, she more often recognized the names in the obituaries. The wax cylinders wore away, leaving only grooves in her mind. But the grooves in her mind remained, waiting to be played again. She never forgot a child.

Horn characteristically mixes believable fabulism, realism, invention, romanticism, and scholarship in a passage which is both mournful and wishful. Although at this point in the book she is almost frantic to be done with her long life, the texture of these inventions in this litany of art, science, healing, and law-giving gives a profoundly optimistic view of the world and of her own past. Among all the generations she produced, some of the children she mothered have had large effects on the world around them. Even though a romantic love that lasts two thousand years but has no place in daily life functions as one of the novel’s narrative threads, the real love here is maternal, the real fear is for the children and grandchildren, and the real source of hope is in who the children have become and what they do.

Rachel’s determined, clever children and grandchildren explore not only the possibilities of moldy bread but also blockchains and gene splicing. When Hillel comes to dinner, her son understands his teachings as the adults cannot. The child for whom Rachel gave up mortality makes a decision during the battle with the Romans over Jerusalem—a decision she doesn’t understand—to save Torah and scholars over the Temple, the city, the people. So much is lost, but Rabbinic Judaism is born. Although some of her children suffer and go terribly wrong, a hopeful texture permeates the passage above, and the book as a whole offers a sense of devotion, of order, of the centrality of looking after family, and the promise of emotional as well as physical rebirth.  

Dara Horn is herself the mother of four children, as well as the author of six books and a long-time Yiddish and Hebrew professor at Harvard, Sarah Lawrence, Yeshiva, etc.. The book captures the texture of a long full life, including Rachel’s great weariness. But there’s also the intensity and pleasure of the reawakening of hope, which a person doesn’t have to live 2000 years to experience.

Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels

The “glimpses, glyphs, & found novels” of this book live somewhere in between poetry, fiction, and memoir. In flash stories and prose poems, a portrait appears of a man on the edge of death wrestling with his life’s meaning and history. So much human, animal, and plant life in these pieces, including a broke Chaim Soutine painting over his own (and other artists’!) canvases, a “minor” dancer in Singing in the Rain, families of all configurations. Everything fits in this slim book, from natural wonders to eye surgery to a miraculously wise artificial parrot who knows just what to repeat. The figures appear as if in silhouette, sharp-edged and hypnotic, dancing, eating imaginary cake all day, and taking a final trip to The Office of The Clerk of Happiness.  

Mc (May 7, 1953 ~ September 30, 2022), was the father of four children, as well as the author of eight books, a long-time editor for multiple magazines and presses, and a faculty member at creative writing programs that included New Mexico State University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Mc was a beloved colleague of mine at Warren Wilson, and I have many memories of him reading his startling, musical, brilliant, sometimes painfully honest, sometimes hilarious work in faculty readings. And memories of conversations, classes, lectures, meals, listening to him sing in the woods…. In writing about this book, I’m departing from the Marvelous Paragraph Project rule where I only write about books by people I don’t know or haven’t known personally (though some of these are by friends of friends: the literary world has, in general, about ¼° of separation). And I sometimes invite writers I know to celebrate a work they love (by an inspiration or mentor, or perhaps a writer who they feel should be better known). Is it So?, with a moving, craft-based foreword by his widow, writer Christine Hale, is Mc’s last work of fiction.  

To avoid any hint of the squidginess of attempting to evaluate or praise a friend (as if I can be objective about any friend’s work, and especially now), I’m focusing on the craft and on the thematic link with Eternal Life, because this book also struggles with life in the face of death. Here, though, is Mc’s great urgency in trying to figure out what happened, what could have happened: the pieces jump through time and space. Mc imagines real and fantastical figures, in realistic and also wild situations. The book gives an experience of the imminent and ongoing breakdown of a body, and, as much as anything I’ve ever read, it embodies a particular, ferocious passion for the texture of life itself as it begins to slip away. 

Part of that wrestling comes through the language, the often provocative, funny, startling, or suddenly moving imagery, part through the ways Mc delivered his mixtures of prose and poetry. (I can hear his voice, reading these pieces: if you have never had the good fortune to hear him read, you can hear him in online interviews or videos, and, with luck, hear him playing the harmonica as well.)

In the introduction, Chris describes the forms of the book: 

The “found novels” in Is It So? wed Mc-the-novelist’s paradoxical fascination with the short form to this book’s focus on rendering transparencies. Set in Desordenada, North Carolina, a made-up town name suggesting disorganization, the novels Mc “found” there extend the concept of the found poem into a novel’s worth of suggested story. The few words comprising each novel are the transparency that avails and evokes prehension of the withheld narrative. The terms “glimpses” and “glyphs” in the book’s subtitle underline its fealty to radical compression and to rendering the mass and volume of what is only ever implied. The glyph is a symbol or pictograph, conveying more information than is visibly present. The glimpses offer a more complete narrative but shatter or torque it by unexpected shifts in time, perspective, or frame. 

Even the table of contents is arranged by groupings of each of the three kinds of forms, rather than in chronological order. Here's the beginning of one of the glyphs, the first page of a page and a half of prose/poem: 

To be opened in the event of

You said that in the event of, you would like instructions straightforward,
simple, which, you understand, I’ve never done.

There is a daylily named Curious. Available (I’ve prepaid) at Dorothy’s Dance Garden. Have one Curious bulb placed in my left hand and two bulbs placed in my right hand, making sure I hold both hands together under my left ear so I can hear the quickening, can think the effort of what is growing through me, feel the three breaking the closed shell of my hands, the shale of my head, naturalizing beyond me, causing me laughter at the comedy of winter failing to kill rot’s regenerating impulse to root, to be rooting, to drift in time-shifting twinning and tripling, to signal turning up and leafing before shooting out molten gold blossoms, the moist swellings and retractings and wet collapsings, the retreating from sight, the returning to my head and to my hands, the multiplying, the perennial drama of trying to hold too many, of letting them go, all of them in their cycles of emptying out and lasting too long, so much like me, like me becoming more sod than sot, more site than slot, while they slump, sift, slighten, disintegrate, disappear, lilt, reappear, lift as they feel, think, hear light.

I’ll let you know when I’ve solved the issue of the gravestone inscription. 

The problem is, as all problems are, a matter of tense. 

That denial of the possibility of simplicity is brief, but with the elided words and ideas and the intimate interjections, already complex. It sets us up for the elaborate, nonsensical, erotic, tactile, poetic celebration of ritual, decay, the human returning to earth and letting go. A bravura paragraph (I am crossing into that territory of praise, but I don’t see how anyone could be objective about this beautiful paragraph that contains the horror and glory of mortality).

And then a one-liner, a complete change of direction, the comical, down to earth but mysterious switch of subjects to the gravestone inscription. (Why is it an issue that has to be solved?) 

In the position when we might expect an explanation, we find out that it’s a matter of tense. So the mystery has to do with time? How does this apply to the dead? And the short short, the glyph, keeps going, changing the rules. Discombobulating, but also heartfelt. 

If Eternal Life could be said to be about motherhood, or love, or the breakage of the world over time, Is It So? is about the madness of what we do for art, or love, the visceral experience of life in, or as, a body. If Horn’s Rachel has to struggle against the impulse to give up in the face of so much loss, the protagonist contemplating death in Mc’s glyph conveys the urgency and constant morphing of life in which even ambivalence becomes part of what is so hard to let go.