Information Storage and the Joseph Story

Dara Horn, an intellectually ambitious writer since her stunning first novel, In the Image (2002), has made it abundantly clear that she is a Jewish-American writer in every sense of the term. Since she is fluent in Yiddish and in Hebrew literature, Horn’s sense of Jewish history is never far from her thickly layered paragraphs. She can adapt aspects of the Hebrew novel into an English-language counterpart, as she does in In the Image, or slip extended references to Der Nister, the nearly forgotten Yiddish writer (and subject of her Harvard dissertation), into the fabric of her second novel, The World To Come (2006). All Other Nights (2009) represents a departure from her previous work, because its focus is the American Civil War, it follows a linear narrative progression, and chronicles the peculiar situation of northern Jews and their southern counterparts in America. At its center is a botched assassination plot against Judah P. Benajmin, the Confederate secretary of state. Poison is the means and the day of reckoning is none other than the first Seder of the Passover holiday.

A Guide for the Perplexed refers to the twelfth-century treatise by the magisterial philosopher-physician Moses Maimonides. It deals with—well—everything serious under the sun: faith and doubt, free will and determinism, truth and deception, and perhaps most of all, how a good man should live. Fast forward to the twenty-first century when Josephine (“Josie”) Ashkenazi has invented a software program that can record and retrieve every moment of a user’s life. In the ancient world, knowledge was equated with power, at least among sages and philosophers. In the present world, knowledge is not only power (as revelations about the nsa have shown), but also hard cash. Josie’s program is worth billions.

The question that prompts Josie’s thinking (“What happens to days that disappear?”) and the reveries that follow (“The light fades, the gates begin to close, and all that a day once held . . . slips between those closing gates”) seem more akin to the novelist’s realm. As Horn embroiders her tale, “gates” become doors, each one folded neatly into the other. Josie calls her program Genizah, referring to the place in synagogues where damaged books containing the name of God are stored.

Horn fashions A Guide for the Perplexed as a series of interlocking pieces. Take Josie’s choice of the word genizah as an exhibit. The most famous genizah is the one in Cairo where Solomon Schechter, a Cambridge University professor in Judaic studies, discovered a treasure trove of centuries’ old manuscripts, including letters about, and drafts of, Maimonides’s classic work. Unfortunately lots of chaff accompanied the wheat: mundane business receipts, pharmacy prescriptions, personal letters, and all manner of stuff that did not contain the name of God. Schechter sifted through the mountain of material he carted back to England with the patience and determination of a saint.

Horn’s novel alternates between Schechter’s scholarly adventures and the updated Joseph story that puts dazzling success and smoldering jealousy in bold relief when Josie travels to Cairo. Unlike Schechter she did not go there to unearth ancient manuscripts but instead to sell her software program to the Arabic-speaking world. All seems to be going well when Josie is kidnapped and cast into a dungeon meant to replicate that pit found in the biblical Joseph story. This time it is one sister plotting against another as Horn both reshapes the Joseph tale and preserves its essential meaning. In a novel filled with assorted sibling rivalries, the unspoken tension between Josie and her sister, Judith, is the most prominent. When the kidnappers release a video that purports to show Josie’s death, Judith soon replaces her as wife and mother.

Without giving away too much about how Horn resolves the tangles of her plot, let me simply say that the novel ends where it began—with doors opening onto other doors: “When you open a door for the first time, you imagine...