The Immortalists explores whether a longer life is necessarily a better one. Varya investigates this question specifically through her work as a biologist, studying primates in order to find ways to extend the human lifespan. Varya even tries to follow some of the experiment’s hypotheses herself: she severely limits her diet in the hopes that it will help her live longer, and she tries to avoid all potential diseases and germs. Yet over time, Varya realizes that this life-lengthening routine is actually making her miserable, because it restricts her ability to engage in life’s basic pleasures and build meaningful relationships. In this way, the story suggests that a longer life is not necessarily a happier one, and that the cost of surviving should not be so high as to prevent a person from truly living.
In order to live a longer life, both Varya and the monkeys she researches have to engage in lifestyles that make them miserable. The chapters that focus on Varya center on her primate research, which hypothesizes that a severely low-calorie diet will lead to longer life expectancies. Halfway through the 20-year study, the restricted diet monkeys look much healthier than the control group. However, Varya finds other issues with them. One day, Varya discovers one monkey, Frida, has started to pull her own hair out, bite herself, and rock herself in her cage. Even though the monkeys live biologically healthier lives, the despondence caused by lack of food does more harm than good. Varya’s life mirrors that of the monkeys she studies. After the fortune teller predicts that she will live to age 88, Varya grows determined to ensure this fate. She follows a restricted, low-calorie diet. She also keeps her home impeccably clean, washes her hands obsessively, and even avoids physical contact with others. However, this obsession creates severe anxiety and unhappiness in her life. When a journalist named Luke, who is writing a story on her research, visits her home, he feels pity for what he views as her miserable life. He says, “to see you like this breaks my fucking heart. You cleared the decks: you had no husband, no kids. You could have done anything. But you’re just like your monkeys, locked up and underfed. The point is that you have to live a lesser life in order to live a longer one.” Luke’s explicit tying of Varya to the monkeys illustrates that she, too, is sacrificing happiness in order to live for a long time. His criticism also implies that a shorter but fuller life would be more satisfying than a longer, empty one.
Simon, Varya’s younger brother, represents a counterpoint to Varya’s journey, as he chooses to pursue happiness as a sexually liberated gay man at the potential cost of his survival in the midst of the AIDS crisis. When AIDS is first tearing through San Francisco, Simon and his boyfriend, Robert, watch their friends contract the disease. Because so little is known about how it spreads, Robert suggests that they do not leave the apartment. But Simon is terrified at the thought of quarantine, thinking that he “already feels cut off from the world, and he refuses to hide, refuses to believe this is the end.” Simon will not give up the liberation of living as an openly gay man and the pleasure of having sex with whomever he wants, and so he chooses to have sex with many partners in addition to Robert. Knowing that this could cut his life short, he still chooses to prioritize a meaningful life over a long one. Decades after Simon’s death due to AIDS, Varya meets with Robert and asks him about that period of crisis. Robert explains his and Simon’s perspective: “When doctors said we should be celibate, it didn't feel like they were telling us to choose between sex and death. It felt like they were asking us to choose between death and life. And no one who worked that hard to live life authentically, to have sex authentically, was willing to give it up.” Even though the community collectively knew that there was danger in having sex, Robert implies in this quote that the cost of giving up such a meaningful part of their life and their identity was too high.
Varya gradually recognizes this perspective, and she also understands that it is more important to find meaning and happiness in life than to cut out all joy in order to survive for a long time. After discovering that Frida is trying to chew her own arm in hunger and unhappiness, Varya breaks down. She ruins the decade-long study by giving Frida as much food as she wants. Her sympathy—even at the cost of her own research—illustrates Varya’s acknowledgement that what the scientists are doing to the monkeys does not actually provide them with a healthier, better life. Instead, it only provides them with a longer one. After this breakdown, Varya makes changes in her own life: she eats more, allows people to touch her, and finds joy in reconnecting with family members that she’s kept at a distance for a long time. Notably, while the novel makes clear that all of the other Gold children did indeed die when the fortune teller predicted, the novel does not reveal whether Varya dies at the predicted age of 88. This purposeful omission in the narrative implies that it no longer matters to Varya whether she survives to that age; rather, it is more important that she has regained happiness and meaning in living.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Surviving vs. Living ThemeTracker
Surviving vs. Living Quotes in The Immortalists
In the final piece, The Myth of Icarus, Simon will perform his first starring role: he is Icarus, and Robert is the Sun.
On opening night, he soars around Robert. He orbits closer. He wears a pair of large wings, made of wax and feathers, like those Daedalus fashioned for Icarus. The physics of dancing with twenty pounds on his back compounds his dizziness, so he is grateful when Robert removes them, even though this means that they have melted, and that Simon, as Icarus, will die.
Robert paces the apartment. “We need to stay here,” he says. They have enough food for two weeks. Neither of them has slept in days.
But Simon is panicked by the thought of quarantine. He already feels cut off from the world, and he refuses to hide, refuses to believe this is the end. He’s not dead yet. And yet he knows, of course he knows, or at least he fears—the thin line between fear and intuition; how one so easily masquerades as the other—that the woman is right, and that by June 21st, the first day of summer, he’ll be gone, too.
“I wish—I wish…”
“Don’t wish it. Look what she gave me.”
“This!” says Klara, looking at the lesions on his arms, his sharp ribs. Even his blond mane has thinned: after an aide helps him bathe, the drain is matted with curls.
“No,” says Simon, “this,” and he points at the window. “I would never have come to San Francisco if it weren’t for her. I wouldn’t have met Robert. I’d never have learned how to dance. I’d probably still be home, waiting for my life to begin.”
“Because I’m sad,” says Luke, thickly. “Because to see you like this breaks my fucking heart. You cleared the decks: you had no husband, no kids. You could have done anything. But you’re just like your monkeys, locked up and underfed. The point is that you have to live a lesser life in order to live a longer one. Don’t you see that? The point is that you’re willing to make that bargain, you have made that bargain, but to what end? At what cost?”
“The thought that you could die from sex,” Varya says, haltingly. “You weren’t terrified?”
“No, not then. Because it didn’t feel that way. When doctors said we should be celibate, it didn’t feel like they were telling us to choose between sex and death. It felt like they were asking us to choose between death and life. And no one who worked that hard to live life authentically, to have sex authentically, was willing to give it up.”
“l think I might like to teach,” she says. In graduate school, she taught undergrads in exchange for tuition remission. She hadn’t thought she could do such a thing—before her first class, she vomited in a sink in the women’s restroom, unable to reach the toilet—she soon found it invigorating: all those upturned faces, waiting to see what she had up her sleeve. Of course, some of the faces were not upturned but sleeping, and secretly, those were the ones she liked best. She was determined to wake them up.
