Expiration Date
By Sherril Jaffe

Reviewed by Ben Pfeiffer

The Permanent Press, 2011
ISBN: 978-1579622152
hardcover, 192 pp., $28

Stories propelled by the terror of death are a tradition as old as storytelling itself; likewise, stories about cheating the Angel of Death or about postponing a fated death are timeless—the myth of Orpheus in Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, for example, where the performer moves Hades and Persephone to tears using music and logic to rescue his beloved Eurydice from their Underworld. Or Chuko Liang, master tactician in Luo Kuan-chung’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms (1533 CE), who attempts to postpone his death with a special ceremony, only to have the ritual ruined at the last moment by a blundering subordinate. And about one-third of the way into Sherril Jaffe’s Expiration Date—another story ostensibly about death—Jonah, the protagonist’s husband, relates an ancient story he learned during his Talmudic studies:

Moses, on his deathbed, pleaded with God to spare him, saying he was afraid of the sword of the Angel of Death—of the pain itself. When God promises He will take him personally, Moses still pleads pathetically for his life, saying he will do anything—live on the wrong side of the Jordan, or as a beast in the field or a bird in the sky. But God says, ‘Now you have only an hour, now you have only a few minutes.’

Some sixty pages earlier, Expiration Date opens in “Heavenly Court,” during a “dream, a vision, or reality,” where the main character, thirty-five-year-old Flora Margolin Rose, receives her “expiration date;” that is, she is told she will die in exactly twenty-five years. No one speaks in her defense, not God or angels, and not her loved ones, dead and otherwise—her mother, Muriel, is still alive in reality, but is somehow part of the heavenly proceedings (“You might not be old when you die,” Muriel tells her daughter, “but you’ll look old”). Despite this whimsical opening, framed as a pregnancy dream, the rest of the book unfolds in a realistic tone, offering a crosscut structure: one chapter from Flora’s perspective and one from Muriel’s. As Flora’s eponymous expiration date draws closer, she becomes increasingly obsessed with her superstitions, and with abstract, existential concepts like fate, death, love, and life.

What mostly allows Jaffe to blend superstition with late-century naturalism is her main character: Flora lives in a world where the simplest event might allow her the pretext of supernatural explanation. In a flashback related to her father’s death, Flora believes that the old man, Jack, has returned from the grave and smashed one of her beloved plates. Because the book is written in an extremely close third-person, with little or no editorializing, we are not told why Flora should believe this ghost story instead of a more logical explanation. By never pulling back, at least in Flora’s chapters, Jaffe encourages the character’s delusions. Flora lives, after all, in San Francisco—could an earthquake have destroyed her plate? No, Flora decides. The only explanation is that her father’s spirit has smashed the plate “to let her know how death was real, that eventually everything fell, smashed, and broke.”

Expiration Date is never entirely comfortable either in realism or fantasy. The prose remains journalistic throughout, including the scene in the “cosmic courtroom,” although Flora’s superstitions take the book in a different direction thematically. The result is an odd, uncomfortable sensation. Muriel’s chapters, considerably more skeptical about signs and symbols, retain the book’s tone and its slow pace, in part because sentences are powered by “to be” verbs and past perfect constructions. For example, take the opening lines of Chapter Twenty:

Muriel had to face the fact that she hadn’t called her daughters in several days. She had been so enjoying not being in touch with Flora or Daphne or anyone else from the world of entanglements and commitments and emotional involvement. Away from the world with its long history, its regrets and anxieties, the things it felt wonderful not to feel—but not because she didn’t love her daughters. Of course she loved them—they were her daughters.

Many chapters, paragraphs, and incidents begin this way in Expiration Date—with a character thinking, recalling some past action, lost in a memory that the author dramatizes only as a nested story. In addition to references to the Talmud, the novel references other books, most notably The Island Within by Richard Nelson, sometimes quoting extensively from these different texts, sometimes paraphrasing them in a character’s voice, as with Jonah’s story of Moses. The references give this book a sense of community; Jaffe plainly feels her novel is part of a tradition of stories about death. As the book unfolds, Jaffe explores the minds of her characters, especially Muriel and Flora, who do not understand each other but who do love each other. For all its existential worrying, which can occasionally grow tiresome, this interpersonal realm is where Expiration Date most succeeds: the dramatization of real-world relationships, those obligatory connections that keep us company in the face of the neverending hereafter.

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Ben Pfeiffer is the co-editor of Beecher’s Magazine, and he teaches creative writing at the University of Kansas, where he is an MFA Candidate in Fiction. You can find more at his website, WritingInTheWild.org.

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