The History of Living Forever

Conrad lives in a small town in Maine. He is a brilliantly precocious science student who has skipped two grades as he worked his way through the public school system. He lost his mother in an auto accident when he was ten, and his distraught father took to drinking and showed little further interest in him.  Conrad now lives with an aunt. 

The summer he turns 16, he falls desperately in love with -- has an affair with -- Mr. Tampari ("Sammy" to Conrad), a brilliant biochemist who, strangely enough, has ended up teaching chemistry to high school students.

Jake Wolff's novel, The History of Living Forever, is a complex, frustrating, and yet somehow inspiring study of scientific obsession, adolescent and adult loneliness, and human insecurity, peppered with enough biochemical scientific studies (real or fictional) and data to persuade you that you've attended a series of college lectures. 

The first day of class, as Conrad begins his junior year after a summer of romantic intoxication, the school announces that Mr.Tampari has been discovered dead, apparently from a drug overdose.  The death is considered accidental.  But Conrad finds that Sammy has left him a gift -- a box containing all his diaries, one for each year since he was eight years old, and a handwritten book of "recipes," entitled "The Elixir of Life."  Did he in fact commit suicide?

Sammy has also given indications that he wants Conrad to carry on his research, whatever that research may have been.  Conrad is devastated by Sammy's death, and by a suspicion that Conrad's love for his teacher was in fact reciprocated by nothing much beyond mild affection.  Otherwise, how could he have left Sammy behind, alone?

Conrad, now in his 40s, is the narrator, but the real story is Sammy's.  This is no conventional gay love story -- nor, alternatively viewed, a story of a teacher's sexual abuse of a student.  (Conrad concedes that, even 25 or so years later, he still remembers his relationship with Sammy as an intense "romance.")  Their relationship is a plot device that explains a strong bond between two highly intelligent people, both almost fanatically immersed in bio-scientific studies.

Sammy's diaries begin when he was eight years old.  He was painfully brilliant even then.

At school, he is so much smarter than his classmates that he feels the weight of their stupidity on his chest -- even after the bell rings, like waking up from a nightmare to find yourself suffocating, still, under the heart-crushing burden of your fear.

Sammy has no friends.  He is convinced his parents don't love him.  He believes that, somehow, he is "broken."  "Broken," in the sense that he is incapable of feeling love, feeling emotion, feeling joy, feeling sadness, feeling excitement.  He is numb.

But he soldiers on.  He has no real enthusiasms, not even reading.

In bed each night, he cries from 10:00 to 10:15 (he sets the timer on his bedside clock).  It's almost a relief, this crying, though he can't explain from what.

Years later, Sammy concludes that he is and always has been, in some sense, mentally ill.

As a child, his psychiatrist told him that he needed a hobby.  He learned, from a club to which his father belonged, of the ancient quest for an elixir -- not an elixir that necessarily allowed one to live forever, but that served as a panacea for any diseases that the taker might have.  Sammy's single-minded quest for such an elixir provides him the structure, the direction, the focus that his life needed.

The book, in chapters throughout, provides case histories of alchemists, scientists, and deluded amateurs who had hoped to develop such an elixir, case histories that Sammy carefully studied. 

A recurring ingredient in past recipes had been the element mercury.  The "blue mass" that Abraham Lincoln took to fight depression contained such mercury.  At age 13, Sammy reconstructed this "blue mass," and consumed a large dosage himself, writing up his experiment as his first entry in his "recipe book."  The result?  "Almost died," he wrote, laconically. . 

His brush with death did not deter him.  He continued, obsessively, throughout life to find a "recipe" for the elixir that would cure all ills, and that would cure his own self-diagnosed "mental illness."  The novel strikes the reader as a source book on the history of various misguided attempts to develop such a panacea, and a treasury of human biochemistry.  Unfortunately, the book is an untrustworthy biochemistry resource, with carefully documented science combined with ideas and hopes by the ancients, by Sammy, and finally by Conrad that amount to scientific quackery.  As the author firmly warns in his introduction

You will find within its pages a number of recipes, all of which seem to promise great benefits to your health and well-being.  To repeat:  this is a work of fiction.  Every recipe in this book, if ingested, will kill you.  Every single one.

From a scientific point of view, certain substances found in nature have the beneficial ability to remove free radicals from the human body, free radicals that may contribute to the aging and degenerative process.  These substances cannot, in any significant amount, however,  cross the brain-blood barrier.  But mercury can cross that barrier.  Sammy's recipes, in effect, used mercury to drag the drugs with it across the barrier.  But mercury is a poison, and will kill if it remains in the brain for any length of time, and the body quickly attacks its ability to cross the barrier once it's detected in the brain.  This attack by the body is counterproductive, because it leaves the mercury trapped on the brain side of the barrier. 

Thus, many early experiments with mercury, used in sufficient amounts, resulted in death.  In Wolff's novel, Conrad comes eventually to believe that he can overcome this hazard by concluding the experiment with electroshock, such as used in fighting depression, which temporarily reopens the brain-blood barrier, allowing the mercury to escape.

Conrad's apparent understanding -- still at the age of 16 --of the scientific basis for the use of various substances, including mercury, in the course of the many attempts to concoct the "elixir of life" -- and his discovery of the use of electroshock therapy to avoid mercury poisoning -- is a central theme of the novel.  If science bores or confuses you -- and there is much about this book that's confusing -- you may want to read a different book.

Conrad's scientific quest to continue Sammy's research, and to apply it to his own dying, alcoholic father, is complicated by a subplot involving competing interests and individuals who are themselves trying to develop the same "elixir of life" for purposes of commercial exploitation.  I'm not sure that this subplot and its villains, which occupies a major portion of the book's central chapters, adds much to the story.  It certainly adds complexity to what is already a complex narrative.

At the end, the father's life is saved, as Conrad uses the last of the drugs that Sammy had left for him.  Whether it has been saved by Conrad's "elixir of life," or by subsequent more conventional diagnosis and treatment, remains an open question -- maybe a bit of both.

As his father recovers in the hospital, Conrad is re-united with his loving aunt who had grown understandably alarmed at Conrad's many absences from home.   And his father expresses his love for him. 

In the final chapter, Conrad -- now in his 40s -- waits fretfully in a hospital to learn whether cancer surgery on his partner has been successful.  He watches a five-year-old boy who is anxiously waiting with his mother for news of his own.  Each time someone comes into the room the boy tenses up, then sighs with disappointment when the news is for someone else.

[M]y God, it's a beautiful thing -- a five-year-old boy, learning his limits, surprising himself and his mother with his first act of patience.  Watching him, I remember all of those feelings:  the fear, the frustration, the hope for the future.  I remember being young, when there was nothing worse than waiting.

Over the years, Conrad has learned that -- for all their common brilliance -- he was not like Sammy.  He was not broken.  When he was 16, he had volunteered the words "I love you" to Sammy, a declaration that Sammy was unable to return.  After Sammy's death, Conrad continued Sammy's research -- partly because of its intrinsic interest, but primarily out of respect for Sammy's wishes.  At the end, he returns his aunt's love and that of his father.  His temporary estrangement from home had been proof that he was a teenager, not that he was broken.

He loves his partner as an adult, and he shows empathy for a small boy, a tiny bird first spreading his wings. 

Wolff says that it took him ten years to write The History of Living Forever, and I can believe it.  It is well-written, beautifully written at times.  It is intelligent, both with respect to science and with respect to human emotion.  It required a second reading for me to write about it in this blog, and I'm sure it still contains enough puzzles to justify, someday, a third.