The History of Living Forever

Starred review from April 29, 2019
The search for an eternal life potion weaves through raw emotion, scientific curiosity, and heartbreak in Wolff’s intoxicating debut. On the first day of his senior year of high school in Maine in 2010, 16-year-old Conrad learns his chemistry teacher and secret lover Sammy Tampari has died in an apparent suicide. Conrad comes home from school dazed, only to find a package from Sammy that contains journals and a key to storage unit. He discovers that Sammy has long been testing an immortality elixir on himself. Conrad enlists best friend RJ to duplicate the substance in hopes of healing his father’s fatal liver disease and RJ’s sister’s muscular dystrophy. Conrad reads, in Sammy’s journals, about Sammy’s depressed childhood and globetrotting search for ingredients first with his overly forgiving girlfriend Catherine and then with boyfriend Sadiq. Wolff blends the journal entries and other flashbacks with ease, incorporating vignettes of historical figures who were drawn to the search for eternal life, as well as the future, and of Conrad’s 40th birthday and his husband’s brain cancer diagnosis. The epic sweep and sly humor in the midst of enormous anguish will remind readers of Michael Chabon’s work as they relish this heady exploration of grief, alchemy, and love.

May 1, 2019

DEBUT Wolff's first novel is many things, but it is mainly a story of the love of teenager Conrad for his high school chemistry teacher Sammy. Besides being lovers, Sammy and Conrad are collaborators on an experiment to find the elixir of life. When Sammy unexpectedly dies by suicide, Conrad begins an urgent search for not only the elixir but also the meaning of Sammy's life and death. As Conrad investigates, Sammy's past merges with Conrad's present. The many flashbacks and multiple time lines, plus the historical asides into prior misguided attempts to find the secret of immortality, create a variegated panorama that risks confusing readers. The story of the teenage Sammy parallels that of the teenage Conrad, and readers will have to stay on their toes to differentiate them. Wolff's narrative moves forward to a conclusion that's anticlimactic and grounded, disappointingly, in reality; that so many intelligent people sought out the elixir seems implausible. But the story isn't really about that. It's about growing, developing relationships, and learning to live. VERDICT A noteworthy first novel. [See Prepub Alert, 12/3/18.]--Michael Russo, Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2019
As long as humans have been alive, we've been obsessed with not dying. In his first novel, Wolff riffs on immortality in a fresh, engrossing tale with a zany cast of characters. On the first day of his senior year, Conrad Aybinder learns that his chemistry teacher and first lover, Sammy Tampari, has killed himself. His unexpected suicide reveals an increasingly convoluted set of circumstances involving Sammy's former lovers?not to mention science whizzes, coin collectors, and drug dealers?all in the hunt for the "Elixir of Life." Skipping from ancient China to present-day Maine to a future New York City, Wolff's kaleidoscopic novel tracks Conrad's desperate attempt to puzzle together Sammy's cryptic clues for the ultimate panacea. A 16-year-old science genius, Conrad is a relatable protagonist caught in the confusion, vulnerability, and turmoil of adolescence. Having lost his mother years earlier, and with an unlovable, sick father at death's door, Conrad reminds us that life so rarely becomes clearer with age. Wolff's wild, hilarious, and moving adventure is rooted in reason and the tough truths of life: how easy it is to hurt the ones we love; that forgetting is easier than forgiving; and that life (with an elixir or not) is never long enough.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from July 1, 2019
A gay teenager with a traumatic past takes up his dead lover's quest for the elixir of life. Conrad, the on-and-off narrator of Wolff's debut novel, lost his mother to a fire at age 10, and soon afterward his father descended into alcoholism, liver disease, and furious gloom. When the novel opens, he's a high school senior living with his aunt, having an affair with his chemistry teacher, and working on a science project about electroshock and memory in rats. When the teacher, Sammy Tampari, is found dead--from suicide? a drug overdose? an experiment gone wrong?--Conrad is pulled ever deeper into an alchemical plot he had not known he was part of, seeking a medical treatment that will save his father by vanquishing death itself. The novel straddles a few decades surrounding the present, ducking back to Sammy's youth as a depressed gay teenager himself and forward into Conrad's future as a scientist worried about his husband's brain-cancer diagnosis. The narration shifts around between first person and third, the point of view alternates between Conrad and Sammy, and the settings include Maine, New York City, Romania, and Easter Island as strongmen, drug dealers, and pharmaceutical researchers join the hunt for a panacea that can cross the blood-brain barrier. More than just a briskly plotted thriller, the book is a meditation on love and loss. The characters' obsession with the elixir brings home the parallels between eternal life and death: Both are a kind of certainty. The best part is the author's figurative descriptions, which teeter between quips and revelations. Conrad describes his aunt's concern for him: "I knew that...the way she treated me, was called 'love, ' even though it made me feel small and different and as if I would never be loved by anyone the way I was meant to be (like someone who deserved love and didn't simply need it, like a blood transfusion)." When his lover apologizes, "I had steeled myself to stay angry, but his voice was a snake-bite. Happiness filled me like venom." Sammy contemplates his own mental state: "The real torture of mental illness is this lingering sensation that normalcy is a thought away, that if only you were strong enough, you could think your way out of it." This beautifully written, carefully plotted, intelligent debut is a melancholy pleasure.

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