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“You must change your life.” Daniel Jacobs, the author of the 2019 novel The Distance from Home, does not quote Rainer Maria Rilke's famous injunction, which appears at the end of his 1908 poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” but it describes precisely the predicament of his protagonist, Hannah Avery. Not that her life was entirely bad when she decided, twenty-two years earlier, in 1972, to accept George Albright's invitation to join him, his wife Pru, and friends on a trip to Nepal. Hannah was thirty-seven at the time, single, still mourning the death of her mother when she was nine. An art curator at the Musϧe Baudry, Hannah enjoys her work, but it doesn't prevent her from feeling lonely, restless, and unfulfilled. Past relationships with men have not worked out; her boss has recently disparaged her work, and she feels the biological clock ticking. She is looking for someone or something that will help her change her life. Will trekking through the unforgiving Himalayan mountains provide Hannah with that opportunity? This is the question that drives the novel.
Daniel Jacobs is well known in the psychoanalytic community. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and Director of the Hanns Sachs Library. He is also Director of the Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies at Princeton and Aspen. A coauthor of the 1995 book The Supervisory Encounter: A Guide for Teachers of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Jacobs has published many articles on psychoanalysis, but The Distance from Home is his first novel—a daunting challenge for an octogenarian.
The Distance from Home contains a wide cast of compelling characters, beginning with Hannah, who is complex, sympathetic, and believable. Jacobs narrates the story through Hannah's point of view, and we trust her perceptions and value judgments. She realizes, from the moment she agrees to travel to Nepal, that the experience may be life-transforming. An authority on se