What would be your preference: a short life characterized by fearlessness and excitement, or a long life marked by routine and extreme caution?

For most people, the choice isn’t necessarily that stark, but perhaps it might be if you knew the date on which you were going to die.

That’s the unsettling piece of information — the exact date of their respective deaths — received by the four Gold children in “The Immortalists,” Chloe Benjamin’s thoughtful if uneven second novel. Ms. Benjamin uses each sibling’s prophecy to fashion a unique variation on the question of destiny versus choice. How does the knowledge of your fate affect the life you choose to live?

The Golds might never have faced the question if, in July 1969, 11-year-old Daniel hadn’t overheard older boys mention a woman with predictive powers who had taken up residence in an apartment on Hester Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

In the book’s prologue, he persuades his siblings to accompany him: timid 13-year-old Varya, the budding scientist; 9-year-old Klara, obsessed from an early age, in one of Ms. Benjamin’s many beautiful lines, by magicians “who perform in more modest venues, where magic is handed from person to person like a crumpled dollar bill”; and seven-year-old Simon, who, in a clichéd indication of his later life, loves hanging around their father’s dressmaking shop and helping him shop for fabrics.

At her rented apartment, the mysterious woman summons each child and tells them their fates. The rest of the book is divided into four sections, each of which focuses on one of the Gold children and their attempts to live with the sentences the woman has handed down.

In the late ‘70s, shortly after their father’s sudden death, Klara forgoes college and hitchhikes to San Francisco to pursue her dreams of becoming a magician. She takes 16-year-old Simon with her; his final scene with their grief-stricken mother is one of the book’s most moving passages.

Once he and Klara find an apartment, he gets a job dancing at Purp, a Castro club with disco balls and dancers painted purple.

Soon, he’s having relationships with many men, the most enduring of which is with a ballet dancer 14 years his senior. Meanwhile, Klara labors to master such classic routines as the Breakaway: hanging in midair from a rope she clutches in her teeth.

In 2006, Daniel is a military doctor in Kingston, N.Y. His job entails “confirming that young people are healthy enough to go to war.” When he discovers that the woman from Hester Street is a member of a clan the FBI is pursuing, Daniel travels to Ohio to confront her over his family’s curse.

The novel’s best section focuses on Varya, the sibling most tormented by the woman’s predictions. Never married, she’s a longevity researcher who experiments on primates to develop a drug that will extend human life. A journalist interviews her in 2010. The secret he shares with her not only disrupts her intentionally dull life but also forces her to question whether her research is worth the sacrifices involved.

“The Immortalists” suffers from predictability. Readers will easily figure out the fate of many of the Golds. And the novel has too many secondary characters and too much unnecessary backstory. Yet it is still a provocative take on the age-old question of what constitutes a good life.

Klara says that the point of magic “is not to negate reality but to peel back its scrim, revealing reality’s peculiarities and contradictions.” As she and her siblings discover, that could also describe the point of life.

Michael Magras is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. His work has appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Houston Chronicle and Newsday, among others.

First Published: January 7, 2018, 5:00 a.m.