In the Beginning, There Was the Word

“People drank a lot of beer, and I wasn’t into that,” Dara Horn ’99 explained to the crowd at Wordsworth Books two Thursdays ago. Horn, a former literature concentrator, current GSAS student and head teaching fellow for last year’s core “Literature and Arts A48: The Modern Jewish Experience,” recently published In the Image, a novel she wrote while studying for a year in Cambridge.

In 1999, Horn was named a Harvard-Cambridge scholar, granting her a post-commencement “year of grace” to pursue any academic subject she desired. Without the rigors of collegiate life and unattracted by the pub scene, Horn found herself with lots of free time. Already an accomplished non-fiction writer—in addition to her position as a columnist for The Crimson, she has written for Time, Newsweek and Science—Horn discovered fiction through boredom.

Horn left Cambridge with an M.Phil in modern Hebrew and the beginnings of In the Image, a novel that strives to demonstrate how secular American culture is infused with Judaic traditions of language and thought. The book is modeled thematically and linguistically on the Book of Job, in which a holy man curses God after suffering numerous losses.

As a scholar of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, Horn is naturally interested in Jewish languages. She explains that even modern secular texts in these languages cannot elude their Biblical associations. In her novel, Horn strives to endow her English prose with this same Biblical force, merging the secular and religious in the story of a modern Job whose life’s obsession—taking snapshots of ancient religious sites—is destroyed during a hurricane.

Horn’s imagery often alludes to Biblical scenes while depicting everyday life. For example, when Leora, whose search for meaning is one of the novel’s central themes, stands at a seal tank in a zoo with her boyfriend, the narrator evokes the parting of the Red Sea:

Jason leaned against the seal tank and blew on its surface... Little waves of water rushed away from him, cowering before his breath. For a moment it seemed to Leora that if Jason blew hard enough, he could blow half the tank’s water away, clearing an empty space for himself to step inside, high and dry.

The narrative foreshadows Jason’s conversion from the world of athletics to Hasidic Judaism. But Horn’s point is that the imagery of Biblical texts governs even the most mundane events.

In the Image begins with a snapshot in time, a single event that propels the narrative both forward and backward: the death of Naomi Landsmann, Leora’s best and only friend. This event causes Leora to meet Naomi’s grandfather, Bill, whose passion for Biblical photographs causes him to view life in discrete moments, snapshots that never form a cohesive whole. Though Bill’s goal is to create “the Bible on film, its greatest moments recorded in stop-action photography,” these tiny squares cannot create a world of meaning for either of the two characters.

At heart, Bill and Leora’s stories deal with the function of art and its failure to provide meaning. The snapshot depictions of holy life that they expect will lead to epiphany ironically blind both from seeing how their own lives fit together. One of Horn’s most clever techniques is to give readers the information they need to put the narrative puzzle together in a way the characters never can. The narration, though it suggests that art can never represent life in its totality, actually becomes a vehicle for total meaning—though this is a privilege that only Horn’s readers, and not her characters, can enjoy.

Though art may be flawed, it can still powerfully challenge uses of religion in modern times. Even in her most Biblical moments, in a chapter written in the style of Old Testament verse, Horn’s humorous criticisms come through. As the Jobean Bill wails at the loss of his precious slides, he confronts Leora, “With your supermarket ethics! Philosophy of Costco! Morality of strip malls; theology of home videos!”

Unfortunately, the delightful witticisms of the narrator are sometimes hampered by heavy-handedness. Both narrator and characters can be preachy in their efforts to make their religious, moral or life philosophies heard. The text is particularly labored as it ventures into Bill’s past, where it finds the necessary connections, symbols and images to reach the novel’s climax. It is tough for the reader to leave the unusual Leora for Bill’s story.

Ultimately, however, the pleasure of seeing the characters’ two worlds diverge and then intertwine makes up for some of the more belabored moments. Horn’s compelling use of language to evoke both the ancient and the modern together offer a gratifying read.

IN THE IMAGE

by Dara Horn

Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.

Hardcover, 288pp.

$24.95