Dibs

You know that current trend in which historical novels have, as their protagonists, actual celebrities who actually lived? A certain sector of novelists “re-animates” such flesh-and-blood people as Sappho, Thomas Jefferson and Arthur Conan Doyle. Last week we got a new one in which Jack London gallivants around Hawaii. Well, now there’s a new twist — a novel whose protagonists were biblical celebrities who may or may not have actually lived, depending on whom you ask. In Eve: A Novel of the First Woman, Elissa Elliott alternates chapters between the voices of Adam (from the Bible), Eve (ditto), and their five kids: Cain, Abel, Dara, Aya, and Naava. Elliott’s descriptions are sensually lush, exactly as you’d hope and expect from the first inhabitants of a brand-new world. In the Garden of Eden, Eve remembers, “the wind raked through the clacking bamboo thicket…. There were so many kinds of green — light, dark, fuzzy, pointed — and enough color in the flowers and shrubbery to outdo any sunrise  or sunset thereafter. Adam shone…. His skin and his face glowed as though the light of the sun itself were a garment.” And yes, we get seriously arousing Old Testament sex: “I tightened and flexed against him and wrapped my legs about him…. His kisses were as flower petals, his touch was as shade and water…. I felt as if I were plunged under a waterfall, breathless…. Oh, if this is Elohim’s doing, I want more of it.” In her afterword, former high-school-teacher Elliott tells readers: “I think the most difficult thing about the writing of the story was how to portray Elohim — how He spoke, what He looked like. I ran the risk of making him appear like Bob Newhart.” As for the three girls: “Eve’s daughters have emerged from my imagination.”