REVIEW: 'The Immortalists,' by Chloe Benjamin

It's the ultimate spoiler alert, the literal deadline: A fortuneteller predicting the exact day of your death. Would you even want to know?

The four Gold siblings on Manhattan's Lower East Side hardly consider the consequences in the hot summer of 1969. Seeking out the rumored psychic on Hester Street is a break in their boredom. Daniel, 11, leads the way, but the old woman behind the door says, "One at a time," and Klara, 9, goes first. Then Daniel, followed by 7-year-old Simon, and finally Varya, 13. "I want to know," she says, and, on hearing a date far in the future, concludes the woman is a fraud. But then she steps out in the sunshine to be met by Klara's tears, Daniel's stone face and Simon's angry silence.

Much of the suspense in Chloe Benjamin's intriguing second novel, "The Immortalists," derives from discovering what fate has in store for the Gold siblings and to what degree each takes the fortuneteller's words to heart as they face love, loss and uncertainty. Benjamin plays the magician, shuffling their lives like a deck of cards, fanning them out in sequence.

First up is 16-year-old Simon, who runs away to San Francisco with Klara in the late 1970s. No way is he going to be the obedient younger son who inherits his late father's tailoring business. He becomes a dancer in a gay nightclub, trains with a ballet troupe, pursues pleasure with reckless abandon, even as the "gay cancer" stalks his friends.

Klara, training herself to be a stage magician, is Simon's best friend and confidante, but drinks too much and blurs fiction with reality as she attempts difficult acrobatic illusions, like "The Immortalists." Eventually, she lands in Las Vegas, where she thinks she sees the old fortuneteller.

Still, as the story moves into the 21st century, it is military doctor Daniel who becomes obsessed with finding the fortuneteller. Varya, long their widowed mother Gertie's prop and caretaker, worries about Daniel and his search. But then she worries about everything, hiding her OCD in her work at a primate research center, studying longevity in Rhesus monkeys.

Simon and Klara are Benjamin's more complex characters, and she casts a spell with the first half of her affecting family saga. Dull Daniel and anxious Varya, as involved as they are in matters of choice and chance, still can't compete with their younger siblings' candle-flame lives. That Daniel evaluates soldiers' fitness for overseas combat seems contrived. Varya's relationship with the monkey Freya is just plain sad. But then — as fate would have it — Benjamin plays a wild card. Aha!

There's more, but life should hold surprises.

Nancy Pate is a writer and critic in Florida.

The Immortalists
By: Chloe Benjamin.
Publisher: Putnam, 346 pages, $26.