In the Image (Dara Horn)

Genre: Literary fiction
Year Published: 2002

No cutesy intro, this time, dear readers: I loved this book, and I'd like to say that as soon as possible. I loved it for its characters, for its fluid incorporation of Jewish culture and law, for its multiple, true-to-life plot threads, but most of all, for its language. Some of the passages in In the Image forced me to put down the book and breathe for a while, just so I could bear to continue reading. Sometimes it was because Dara Horn writes beautifully, but more often it was because the words matched my own thoughts or experiences so closely that it was eerie. I feel the need to provide a few examples, so here goes:

Leora and Lauren and Melanie slept on futons, ate off of hard plastic picnic plates, hung their posters on the walls using poster gum, and lived their evenings by the light of halogen lamps. They recycled their newspapers, deleted their answering machine messages, and rarely were in the apartment at the same time. They each bought their own food and never even considered consolidating their shopping, preferring somehow the three half gallons of orange juice that clogged up the refrigerator each week. Every woman for herself. Only Lauren bothered to clean the bathroom. There were a few pots and pans, hauled in by various parents on various move-in days and duly bequeathed to the apartment at large upon move-out, but only the spaghetti pot received any kind of regular use. The vast majority of their drinking glasses were mugs embossed with the names of insurance companies. It was as if all of them had signed a secret unwritten lease stipulating that it wasn't worth buying real forks or getting things framed or having real beds, that this wasn't real life but rather some kind of dress rehearsal for it, that they wouldn't be there long.

Or, moving from the mundane to the sublime, this is the interior monologue of a man who's fallen in love with Leora (the main character):

Being with [her] . . . does not so much resemble a time as it does a place. A moment spent with Leora does not join the moments of his life alongside the other moments, sliding like a bead onto the string of his life and clicking into place next to the moment spent walking to meet her at a restaurant and followed by the moment spent squinting at the sky alone later that evening while trying to make out a star. No, a moment spent with Leora separates itself, refusing to associate with the drab neighborhood of memories around it, walling itself off like an ancient quarter of a city filled with crooked streets, where you don't need to know where you are going because you are already there.

Anyone who's ever moved out of their childhood home has experienced the first, and anyone who's been in love has experienced the second. But the language and the clarity of metaphor that Horn employs are stunning to me. Her novel reads like prose written by a particularly clear-headed poet.

The novel is about equally balanced between the present-day life of Leora, and the recounting of one Jewish family's experiences with life in America and in Europe throughout the twentieth century. The Holocaust barely figures, however; the novel is very much about individuals, and all of the people we follow closely are lucky enough to escape the Nazis' path. They are not, however, particularly lucky in other respects, and Horn catalogues mental illness, domestic abuse, cruelty, and death with the same crystal-clear voice she uses in the above passages. Only her matter-of-fact treatment makes some of the worse incidents readable, but as a reader you feel she is only being historically fair, never sadistic, in making her characters' lives difficult.

I think that this book will be easier to read and understand if you are, in fact, an American East Coast Jew of Eastern European extraction. But I don't think that non-Jews should skip over this book because all the characters are Jewish. As long as you pay attention, you will get a glimpse (or maybe more) of the interwoven symbols and themes -- Jewish and irreligious -- that populate each chapter of In the Image. Horn is careful to slip explanations of all her straightforward Jewish usages into the text, and you can appreciate the book just fine without the deeper understanding you would get from a background in the Bible. Prose this good is too precious to pass over because you don't happen to share the author's religion.

Recommended? Hell yes.