Walking by an independent bookshop one day, I saw a sign in the window advertising an event: Allegra Goodman talking about her new book, This is Not about Us. I’ve been a fan of Goodman for decades, have read all her Jewish fiction and most recently, her decidedly not-at-all Jewish novel, Isola, about a 16th-century French noblewoman abandoned on an island. I have taught Goodman’s writing – including this semester – and when asked to write about an exemplum of postwar Jewish American writing for the Oxford History of the Novel in English, I chose Goodman’s Kaaterskill Falls.
I paid little heed to the writer with whom Goodman was in conversation at the bookshop. But when I went up to fangirl, the woman who had been sitting beside my husband turned to him and confessed she had never heard of Goodman; she came because Goodman’s interlocutor, Nikki Erlick, was her favourite writer.
When I happened to see that Erlick’s 2022 novel The Measure was available on Libby (the library app, chock full of audiobooks and a literary girl’s best friend), I borrowed it. The premise was intriguing enough: one day, every single person aged 22 and older received a box, and in the box was a string that told the exact length of each person’s life. I don’t read a lot of concept books, so I wasn’t convinced that the book would hold my attention. I was wrong. Erlick skilfully explores how this small tweak to the world that we know could change everything…
I was still thinking about Erlick’s novel when I went to see my new oncologist. Warm, dimpled, and full of smiles, the doctor immediately won me over (it didn’t hurt that when I mentioned I was Jewish, he asked, concernedly, if I had any family in Israel and if everyone was OK). He spent over an hour with me, going through my history, my treatment, and my future. Then he said he wanted to tell me about a new blood test, one that could determine if my cancer would recur.
Despite my mastectomy and radiation, I have always been aware that there could be a small number of residual cancer cells in my body. From my breast, the cancer had spread to one sentinel lymph node, which was removed during my mastectomy; it could also be in my blood. Like the lymphatic system, the circulatory system ferries cells all around the body. I could feel 100 per cent healthy not knowing that swimming through my blood vessels were deadly cells just waiting to enter my bones, liver, lungs. The test is simple, he said, and the results are simple, too: positive or negative.
“There’s just one thing,” he added. “If we find out that it’s in your blood… we don’t know what to do with the information.”
In The Measure, as people realise their deaths are inevitable, efforts to prolong life – whether through medicine or prayer – quickly begin to feel futile. One thread in the novel deals with generations of soldiers carrying a copy of the Hashkiveinu, the Jewish prayer for protection, as they go out to battle. In the Second World War, a Jewish soldier gives it to his gentile soldier friend; the Jew dies and the gentile, who can’t even read the prayer, lives. The talisman at that point appears to have power.
Later, the Hashkiveinu is given by the gentile soldier’s grandson to his friend. Yet, that friend has a short string, so when he dies, the Haskiveinu in his pocket, we know that it was never the Hashkiveinu really protecting him, because nothing could protect him. When his time was up, it was up. The test is not a talisman; it is not a prayer. It is science. But science doesn’t always have all the answers. It might tell you that you will die, but it can’t tell you how you should live.
After the doctor’s office, I got on the train and cracked open Goodman’s new novel, the one she talked about with Erlick at the bookshop. It begins with a woman dying of cancer. But she keeps refusing to die, and in some ways her death is beside the point; the story is about the drama created by an apple cake made better by one sister than another, about a granddaughter who doesn’t want to fly home to visit her dying grandmother because flying is bad for the environment, and about the way the family members see (but don’t see) each other. The story, in other words, is about life: sticky, complicated life.
Sticky, complicated life appeals to me. The simple test with the simple results: what good would it do?
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