A Middling Review of Original Sin

The Book of Eve

The Book of Eve, by C. R. Chatem-Johnson, Blumen Press

Review-essay by A. Treadham

Chatem-Johnson’s latest marathon-in-disguise-as-a-novel has arrived and none a moment too soon. The Book of Eve is timely and gripping, if also disgusting in the best possible way. Let me explain.

As its title implies, the novel tells the story of Eve from the beginning: nude and innocent, frolicking with Adam in the woods—for this is Chatem-Johnson’s Garden, rendered lush and sunlit in her vivid prose. It’s intriguing to follow Chatem-Johnson’s investigations of an essentially pre-pubescent Adam and Eve. They are chaste and amiable cousins until the very cusp of puberty, when Adam genially teases Eve for the coils of hair spreading between her thighs, even as he boasts of his own.  

In a state of distress, Eve runs into the trees, encountering the snake. Not the prelapsarian monster of temptation. Rather, a small green garter, mute and indifferent. Eve allows the snake’s presence to comfort her. The snake does not fear Eve, but neither does it menace her, and in contemplating the snake, Eve develops consciousness. So the encounter with the snake is developmental. Here I note the key difference between King James and Chatem-Johnson. Eve is not seduced. She is neither victim nor victor. She, sitting naked, tears streaming down her face, is a thinker. A philosopher.

As she considers the garden, Eve notices a small red scabby fruit hanging from a tree. She observes other animals eating these fruits—squirrels for instance, for this is a North American new world. She has lost sight of the snake but it has awakened in her the powers of contemplation. She tastes the fruit, its sweetness. And so she brings it to Adam and impresses upon him her changed vision of the world. 

To be safe from poison—for Adam is superstitious, if scientific—he will only taste the apple from her mouth. She chews for him. She presses her lips to his. To Adam, the apple and Eve taste impossibly good. 

And so they discover each other, blah blah blah. It’s all quite erotic and banal; you’ll have to read for yourself. 

It’s after an encounter among the trees, the fruit rotting now, the beasts crawling, that the story really takes root, and this reader was not expecting such a contemporary impulse. I have argued elsewhere that it is impossible to write an historical novel. We are always writing of our own time, however we may disguise it. 

Here’s what shocked me. Although this story of the Garden (or rather, the woods) is in the air, the water, the culture, I had never stopped to consider the experience of a pregnant Eve. Without an elder woman to guide her, without books, without precedent—of course, Eve feels she must have done something wrong. She must deserve this punishment. And while The Book of Eve makes clear she has not sinned—she has merely fed Adam nourishment from her lips and dallied with him among the damp leaves—despite that, Eve suffers. 

She loses the ability to eat. Her guts churn. Her limbs droop with fatigue. Adam believes she may be dying, and tries to force fruit between her lips, chewing it himself. She vomits. She weeps. Her body swells. He fears she may bear a contagion, and though it pains him, Adam shuns her.

Eve is alone. The snake comes to bear witness. It seems to mean something. But in truth, the snake merely wishes to sniff the puddle of vomit quivering in the dirt, the vile trail dripping from Eve’s mouth. 

Adam blames the apple, though he is not ill from eating it. He blames the snake, the sky, the very dust. Adam does not want his only companion to suffer. And Eve is very young, the novel reveals. Through skillful use of scratched branches and observations of the cosmos, Adam estimates that Eve is twelve. Adam hovers at a distance, while Eve suffers and swells and cries for wretchedness. The seasons change and change again. The climax when it comes is troubled with blood and agony. Eve dies, leaving Adam alone in paradise. There is no sound but the howl of a child whose mother was unprepared for its arrival. 

The rest of the story is that of Adam and the child and the cosmology they create from Eve’s ashes. The way the story gets told becomes the story itself, what the French call mise-en-abyme. Adam now recounts the story of Adam and Eve, as does the child, who blames the mother for being unable to survive giving birth. The story is told so many times, in so many ways, it begins to feel true. That woman, that original woman, stained. That mother, unsupported, lost, and of course, so deeply evil that her very name is the shuttering of light, the darkening of the world.

And so the original sin is revealed over the course of the novel to be a lie. And not just any lie: this fundamental sin, in Chattem-Johnson’s intricate, measured prose, is specifically a denial of the hardships of pregnancy and birth. Hardships so terrible that sin itself—the very concept, the theological fundament—must be invented to explain them. As Chattem-Johnson apparently has been working on the novel over the past nine years, it is disturbingly prescient. 

But of course, as I have written elsewhere, much as historical fiction is really contemporary, so too the present endlessly retells the story of the past. The handwriting was already on the wall, waiting to be transcribed. And now, Reader, alone in the Woods, without compass or guide, here we are.