“Eleanor has been ripped out of time . . .”

Without that one little sentence on the cover, it would be easy, initially at least, to lose one’s genre bearings in the opening 70 pages or so of Jason Gurley’s Eleanor. The prologue and subsequent sections each present the reader with an efficient, though not rushed, snapshot of consecutive tragedies in one family. Connected by more than just the bloodline, each of these episodes is the sort of material from which weepy, sweeping family sagas are made. That Eleanor is, ultimately, exactly that—a sweeping family saga—should not detract from the fact it is also much, much more. These opening blows grant an intimate knowledge of the damage done by the past to the title character in the present, even as it primes the reader to desperately hope the events that follow will allow, somehow, mortal wounds to be redressed.

These opening sequences are worth lingering on for a few reasons. Beyond the need to establish reader trust, they also capture the often hard-to-grasp dilemmas of depression and motherly ambivalence with an ease and economy that pretty much “pay the toll” a reader demands from a writer to keep turning the page, no matter the genre. One could stop at the end of these alone—granted, that would be a pretty depressing place to halt—and deem this a novel worth the time.

Fortunately, there remains the whole “Eleanor being ripped out of time” thing. With past literally as prologue, Gurley turns the reader’s attention to his protagonist, a mostly isolated teenager and, in ways she cannot fully comprehend just yet, a devastated vestige of past parental mishaps and mistakes. Eleanor makes do, serving as caretaker for a mother whose anger has long since chased her father away, until one stressful day she walks through a door and . . . is somewhere else.

Eleanor (and the reader) will spend the rest of the book trying to figure out exactly what is happening, and who might be involved in causing it, but this story is not a Calgon-take-me-away escape to Narnia, the Land or Wonderland. If Eleanor wants a new world, she may have to make it herself. As for the reader, Gurley has crafted an appealing little puzzle. Whether that solution is metaphysical, spiritual, magical or scientific in nature, I’m not saying. Read it for yourself.

It’s best to get the main conceit of Jessica Chiarella’s debut novel, And Again, out of the way: four people with terminal conditions win a lottery that entitles them to participate in what’s called the SUB program. This is a program where their bodies are cloned and when they reach the biological age of the participants—which happens after a few months—their memories are transplanted wholesale into the new bodies. Think of Jake in Avatar getting his consciousness uploaded into his Na'vi body, except for these people, the body is wholly theirs, made from their own cells. Yet, the new body, bereft of the dings, dents and scars that even healthy people accumulate, is not quite theirs at all. 

The transplants—Connie, Linda, Hannah and David—wake up to a world where sounds, smells, tastes and colors are almost unbearably intense, for their senses are as acute as those of young children. They have to be taught to coordinate their arms and legs, to walk, to write again. For some, the reprieve from mortality makes them humble; for others, it makes them cruel and reckless. The loved ones who expected them to die are as confounded as if they had indeed come back, whole and impossibly healthy, from the dead.

Chiarella doesn’t linger over the technical details of the SUB program, even though the reader is curious. These folks remember absolutely everything about their lives—you can’t even really call them past lives, since the transfer from the old body to the new clone seems to be as easy as putting on a new suit. What sort of gruesome research went into this medical procedure? As for the old, damaged bodies—is there nothing left of the person? Do the patients, even for a moment, have the ghastly feeling of being two places at once? It is actually to the author’s credit that she doesn’t answer these questions; they’d only gum up the narrative.

It’s Chiarella’s laser-like focus on her characters as they fight to pick up the threads of their old lives that makes And Again the unsettling, thought-provoking book that it is.