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A review by P.E. Logan
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Sena Jeter Naslund’s new novel, Adam & Eve, is a phantasmagoric re-imagining of the biblical first couple. Recast in the year 2020, Adam is a young American soldier; his “Eve” is Lucy Bergmann, the thirty-something widow of a brilliant astrophysicist.
Their fates conjoin when a piano falls several stories and crushes Lucy’s husband, Thom. Thom had uncovered incontrovertible proof that extraterrestrial life exists, and his death sets in motion a plot that will travel across two continents–including religious extremists, a jealous scientific community, and a sojourn in “Eden.”
Adam & Eve is thought provoking with scholarly references to world religions, Genesis, and the age-old battle between creationism and evolution. There is also plenty to consider about the idea of starting life over – from day one.
Thom died with his secrets. The McGuffin here is the information on a titanium flash drive hanging around his wife’s neck for safekeeping. Lucy is not privy to what’s on the data stick and is, oddly, incurious. She wears the amulet steadfastly though, as a symbol of their love, unknowingly making herself a target of Thom’s foes.
Three years following Thom’s death, Lucy, an accomplished pilot who is now an art therapist in America, attends an international symposium in Cairo honoring Thom’s work. She leaves the conference early and travels to Luxor and the Upper Nile, escaping the memory of her beloved husband.
After a week with a tour group, she strikes out on her own to see the Nag Hammadi texts, a.k.a. the Gnostic gospels. At the exhibit hall she encounters Arielle Saad (whose father, Pierre, organized a symposium on Thom’s work). Eventually Lucy is recruited to smuggle–via Pierre’s old single-engine plane–an ancient codex containing a transcription of the Book of Genesis. But the aging plane’s engine fails en route and Lucy crashes in the desert.
She is found by Adam, who has lived in isolation for some time. Having wandered injured from the ongoing wars in the Middle East, he is alone and naked like the first man. He has lost any sense of reality in his makeshift paradise. His memory is impaired from the war and he assumes that he is the biblical Adam, with whom he shares the same first name, awaiting God’s instructions and divine intervention.
If he is indeed Adam, where is Eve? He rescues Lucy from the fiery crash, alive but severely burned. In his traumatized mindset, he believes God has answered his prayers. Their Eden, a glebe in Mesopotamia near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, is a serene landscape rich with flora and fauna. Adam and Lucy are in a world apart, evocative of “Robinson Crusoe” as they forage for food (unusually plentiful) and create rudimentary shelter. Lucy too is sans-culottes after the crash. But the author holds off on any gratuitous sex scenes. In Naslund’s future world there is full respect for the opposite sex even if everyone is in the buff for a couple of chapters.
During the rescue and recovery efforts for Lucy, the novel flips back and forth between other character studies and time frames. There are also interludes filled with dreams. These sequences set up why others in the various religious and scientific communities want to find Lucy, more over, the flash drive, and also set up Adam’s past. He is not the historical Adam, but a former Midwestern farm boy, now a disenfranchised G.I. with psychological disorders. Ultimately, he likes paradise. Lucy enjoys their idyll, but reality calls. The codex and her husband’s work on the flash stick must live on.
A book like “Adam & Eve” rests on suspension of disbelief. Can the reader buy the premise that Lucy easily acquiesces to fly, solo, across war-stricken terrain? That in the year 2020 there’s no way to locate Lucy electronically following the crash? The novel does suffer at times from over-plotting and some of the exploits are farfetched, always a sticking point in magical realism, negotiating the balance between imagination and reality.
Regarding that falling piano, there must be a less obvious and easier way to murder someone in the future than dropping a grand piano on the sidewalk. Imagine those rapscallions with their ropes, holding a Steinway, three floors above, waiting for poor Thom to walk by. In a book nuanced with hidden meaning, I took this to mean art tops science, like a hefty version of rock-paper-scissors.
Naslund is a writer of many acclaimed and best-selling books including, Abundance and Ahab’s Wife. Her texts are bountiful and her style is expressive and insightful with long passages that entice and push the reader to think. She wants you to inhabit her characters. Here she is urging you to ponder your existence in the universe and muse over the historical version of creation versus the scientific explanation. She’s left crumbs of information along the way to encourage this, such as naming her character Lucy with a nod to the female human fossil.
You won’t skip quickly through the chapters as if this were the latest quasi-religious thriller. Here the pacing demands you pay more attention to the scholarly details Naslund has painstakingly researched, or you will miss the guideposts along the way. When I finished I returned to the first chapters to re-acquaint myself with the clues the author left like broken twigs along a path.
P.E. Logan is a communications and marketing professional and a writer in New York. She worked at various adult trade publishing houses including Random House, Putnam, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster for almost three decades. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post and in other periodicals.