Time is the anchor of our lives, but it’s also the glue of plot. Rebekah Bergman’s debut novel, The Museum of Human History, investigates the human obsession with time—specifically, with finding a cure for aging. Unspooling the potential dark consequences of that cure, the novel explores what happens when we dispense with time as a way to organize narrative and understand experience.

Doing away with a single narrator, and with familiar methods of representing past, present and future, Bergman offers glimpses into her characters’ minds as they grapple with disruptions in their experience of time. The characters live on Marks Island, a place that— being connected to the mainland by a “long, skinny bit of land—is no longer an island.  A biotech company, Genesix, is mining its remaining shoreline for a strange red alga. Genesix is using this substance to develop a drug called Prosyntus, which promises to stop aging in its tracks.  

While these pharmaceutical experiments are going on, eight-year-old Maeve Wilhelm ingests algae from the beach and falls into an eerie sleep. Transfixed as if by a spell, the sleeping Maeve does not age. Alternating between the years prior to and after the accident, Bergman zigzags among the perspectives of the people touched by Maeve’s story, from her maddeningly impractical father and troubled twin sister to the eccentric cult that gathers outside the house in which Maeve sleeps. Bergman envelops the reader in the miasma that disorients the community after Maeve’s accident, as aging, their shared marker of time, is removed.

To live without aging is an idea that fascinates; despite its fantastic premise, Bergman’s novel is psychologically realistic, being in touch with our present concerns. Bergman suggests that, if offered an antidote to aging, many of us would take it.  

But without time’s steady erosion of our bodies, we cannot be alive. Maeve’s twin sister, Evangeline, reflects that Maeve, frozen in her childhood body, “seemed much more dead than she was living” and wonders if she is “maybe more nonliving than dead?” As Maeve ceases to grow older, she becomes no different from the objects in the Museum of Human History that Evangeline is taken to visit. Living and aging, Bergman suggests, are one and the same. 

Bergman’s portrayal of the impact of Prosyntus is subtle and precise. Syl, whose older husband Abe takes the drug, realizes that she understands time through the physical changes that occur in herself and the people she loves:

She pictured a future where she approached death without any physical signs of aging, without changing. It was a hard image to hold on to. … It was impossible to empty the future of the past it was meant to contain.

This elegant metaphor, of emptying, suggests we interpret time by projecting ourselves, through imagination, into psychological containers that we call the past and the future. Imagination, Syl concludes, is “so close to memory. When you pictured the future hard enough, it could feel like the past.”

For Bergman, memory is our evidence of time; through it, we exist in the minds of others. When Prosyntus is offered to the public, it strips people of their memories, and this forgetting is akin to bereavement. We meet one character, Luke, as his wife Tess is dying of cancer; he obsessively photographs her during their final days together, attempting to preserve her for his future self. He projects himself into this future as these days are happening, musing, “he’d have dozens of canisters of film to develop in the darkroom […] it would be, he felt, a very long trip he’d have to go on without her.”

This imagined future does not become reality; Luke takes Prosyntus and loses his memory. As he then tries and fails to remember Tess, we’re led to ask: What is worse, grieving or forgetting the people we want to grieve?

As she bends and rearranges time in her narrative, Bergman makes time the novel’s unifying thread. Small details gain significance as they pass through her different characters’ minds, making the experience of time a shared phenomenon. Time, Bergman shows us, “washe[s] over everything,” and her original and compelling debut offers a warning against our efforts to manipulate it.

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Rebekah Bergman’s fiction has been published in Joyland, Tin House, The Masters Review Anthology, and other journals. She lives in Rhode Island with her family. 

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Sarah Moorhouse graduated from the University of Oxford in 2022 with an MSt in English Literature. She works as an editorial assistant at Sage Publishing and writes regularly for The Oxford Review of Books, The Bookseller, and LitHub.