Book review: ‘Adam & Eve: A Novel’ by Sena Jeter Naslund

The clash between science and faith is a subject that bestselling author Sena Jeter Naslund returns to in her new novel “Adam & Eve,” but, unlike her previous books “Ahab’s Wife” and “Abundance,” her latest demands a suspension of disbelief that is difficult to provide.

In the year 2017, a renowned astrophysicist named Thom Bergmann is murdered shortly after having made a breakthrough discovery: irrefutable proof of extraterrestrial life. He tells no one but his wife, Lucy, entrusting her with the evidence on a computer flash drive in case something should happen to him. He’s aware that religious fundamentalists consider his research into “life beyond the stars” blasphemous and threatening, and would do anything to stop him. His murder is made to look like a freak accident.

Three years later, Lucy is still a grieving widow, living in New York City and working as an art therapist. She wears the flash drive — which she refers to as “Thom’s memory stick” — as a talismanic pendant around her neck, guarding it protectively. When she’s invited to an international symposium in Egypt, organized in honor of her husband, she eagerly accepts. The event proves transformative.

In Cairo, Lucy becomes the unlikely confidant to Pierre Saad, an anthropologist who inexplicably entrusts her with another secret of staggering magnitude: the unearthing of an ancient codex that gives a radical retelling of the biblical story of Genesis. Because it undermines the core beliefs of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, a cult of religious extremists is determined to destroy it — and anyone who stands in their way. Yet Pierre asks her to smuggle the sacred scrolls (in a French horn case, no less) to a secret location in the south of France.

If the plot sounds absurd, that’s because it is. Not only is Lucy a central target in a dangerous international drama, but en route to France, the small plane she pilots — yes, she happens to know how to fly — crash lands, and she discovers a stunningly handsome (and naked) American soldier named Adam. Abused by militants and left for dead, he is delusional from post-traumatic stress. “God put me here,” he explains. They spend their days in a “verdant Eden” and eventually fall in love. (Adam even insists on calling her Eve.)

After their paradise is disrupted by violence, the story becomes even more preposterous: There’s the appearance of a feral boy, villains, prehistoric cave paintings, chase scenes and conversations on faith that prove clichéd rather than edifying. Readers hoping for a complex, Margaret Atwood-like dystopian vision will be disappointed, and the novel is too disjointed to succeed even on the level of a Dan Brown conspiracy thriller.

Ostensibly, “Adam & Eve” offers provocative ideas, as Naslund seems to rail against literal readings of sacred texts and the intolerance of religious zealots. Such notions are lost, however, amid clumsy plotting and sanctimonious dialogue. It’s unfortunate that the story ends with the word “authenticity,” as everything preceding it seems quite the opposite.

Ciuraru is a critic and the editor of poetry anthologies, including, most recently, “Poems About Horses.”