Her fourth novel, ‘A Guide for the Perplexed,’ reanimates the past without falling into the traps of ‘Shtetlworld’ nostalgia
By Saul Austerlitz for Tablet
Dara
Horn’s home, like her life, has two levels. On the higher level are
rooms full of toy dinosaurs and Babar posters. On the lower one, shelves
full of Yiddish and Hebrew books and Zambian carvings and wooden panels
from China do battle with water guns and baby bottles. “I live a double
life,” she said as she provided me with the abbreviated grand tour of
her Essex County, N.J., home. “I think all parents have a double life.”
Horn’s double life is just a bit more double than most other parents’;
perhaps we can call it her quadruple life. The relevant statistics: age
36; four children; and, with the publication of her new book, A Guide
for the Perplexed, four novels.In addition to two levels, Horn also has two desks. The first, in her bedroom, is home to a haphazard pile of books and school forms and cover mockups. The second is in her living room and is completely bare except for a slim laptop. Horn prefers working at her second desk, where the everyday concerns of her other life can be temporarily left behind. Her work day lasts from 9:30 until 2:30, when her children finish school, and she heads off in her minivan, outfitted with four car seats, to pick them up. On this midsummer day, though, her kids are in camp, and the workday has been extended for an additional hour.
***
Inspired by the stranger-than-fiction story of the Cairo geniza, an archive of a millennium’s worth of letters, documents, and religious texts discovered in a Cairo synagogue in the late 19th century, A Guide for the Perplexed alternates among three interlocking stories.
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