Eden and beyond

The story of Adam and Eve extends from the end of the first chapter of Genesis to the beginning of the fifth. In The First Love Story: Adam Eve, and Us (2017), Bruce Feiler turns the story into eight chapters and 269 pages. But writers from John Milton to Mark Twain to Ernest Hemingway have been building on the Genesis account for centuries, always finding (or imagining) something new. Feiler uses these earlier studies and adds his own interpretations in this fine, thoughtful book.

Feiler's focus is not the first sin but rather the first love story, the initial model for all love stories to follow "They can't steal someone else's pickup lines or dance to anyone else's love songs," he writes. "They must write their own story. They must invent what it means to be in a relationship."

Getting ejected from the Garden of Eden was not all bad, according to Feiler. To him it was something akin to a couple leaving their parents and striking out on their own, facing an uncertain future alone but together. They chose love over obedience, he argues.

In addition to Milton, Twain and Hemingway, Feiler looks for insights into this story from the likes of Mae West, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lord Byron, Pope Francis and a host of others less well known.

"Their story is not just about sin, disobedience, ingratitude, squandering their inheritance, and ruining life for the rest of us," Feiler says of Adam and Eve. "Their story is also about originality, forgiveness, bouncing back from calamity and modeling resilience.

"Their story is above love in all its messy carnal, hopeful, resurgent glory."

Feiler, author of such books as Walking the Bible and Abraham, has made a career out of, in his words, "trying to relate biblical stories to the present." In The First Love Story, though some of its interpretations may strike readers as weird, he manages to do this well, making the oldest story of all fresh again.