Alexander Shalom Joseph’s tender debut novella, The Last of the Light, belongs to a tradition of storytelling known as apocalypse fiction. But only nominally: very little time is spent on why or how the world is ending. Joseph writes that “the governments of every nation” have sent out a universal APB indicating that the world’s days are now severely truncated. The governments apologize, explaining that the planet’s imminent demise is the “result of an event which the world’s best scientists had been unable to come up with a way of preventing.”
It’s a relief that this isn’t a book concerned with the science of end times. There is no wild theater of planetary destruction, no darkness and fire. Instead, Joseph’s book muses quietly on family, Jewishness, and what it means to be alive in the waning days of the world. It muses so quietly, in fact, that it can sometimes be hard to make out exactly what it’s trying to say.
Half of the novella is composed of diary entries written by the “young man,” a thoughtful and painfully earnest character in his mid-twenties who has moved home to weather the last month of the world with his parents and his grandfather, Zayde, who suffers from dementia. The other half of the novel is filled with third-person chapters in which the young man spends his last day alive reading his own diary entries.
When he was a child, the young man’s mother — a creative writing and Jewish studies professor who authored books on “Jewish history with sci-fi and horror elements” — told him stories about the Tzadikim Nistarim, the Talmudic notion that in each generation there are at least thirty-six righteous individuals whose singular purpose is to justify humanity’s existence to God. This idea comes back to the young man and imbues his final days with a sense of purpose. He decides to keep a diary “for the sake of sparking a pinprick of something bright in the deep.”
If the young man’s insights into the nature of things lack the crackle of a deeper thinker or the bitter resentment of someone with something to prove, it’s because he is both too old and not old enough to be the company one wishes him to be at the end of the world. The chapters written in the third person spin their wheels, obfuscating the young man’s attempt to follow in the footsteps of the Tzadikim Nistarim. Nevertheless, the sincerity of Joseph’s debut is admirable, making it a rare artifact in contemporary fiction.
Zachary C. Solomon is from Miami, Florida. He received an MFA from Brooklyn College, where he was a Truman Capote fellow. He lives with his wife, the novelist Mandy Berman, and their two children in New York’s Hudson Valley. A Brutal Design is his first novel.
