James Wood: The Book Against God
[Published in PLAYBACK:stl, September 2003]
Those who prefer their literary God-grapplings with the rattling fury of a Dostoevsky world – The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot – may find English literary critic James Wood’s The Book Against God (FSG) a bit calm for the territory. Its narrative movement is gentle, almost polite. But though the book doesn’t contain the bold bursts as the above novels do, it has its own steady warmth – it’s funny, and holds a modest earnestness – that makes it both memorable and pleasurable.
At the book’s center is narrator Thomas Bunting, whose life is a series of contradictions. He’s got “lavish habits” (good wine, great pajamas), but zero cash. He’s intellectually ambitious (he’s four notebooks into his “Book Against God,” personal journals that challenge theology), yet dragging out his PhD thesis for a seventh year. And, most importantly, he’s a self-proclaimed seeker of truth with a self-admitted habit of lying. Indeed, his lies are the book’s main plot points – from smaller lies told to credit-card companies to whoppers told to his wife (Yes, I will do my part in conceiving a child) and to his priest-father (Yes, I am, in fact, seeking God).
While Bunting’s dissolving marriage is important to the story, his relationship with his father is really the book’s emotional thrust, the paternal presence providing the mirror that reveals the son’s, well, childishness (think Quiz Show). His father is a good, solid man, and his lively and open relationship with religion – a reviewer of books, he detached the sticker of one that arrived (“This is an advanced copy in lieu of a proof”) and stuck it to his Bible – seems to vex Thomas, whose logical rationalizing leaves no room for faith. And as the book heads into its latter stretches, the question is whether the son will be able to speak with his father about religion with the honesty he writes of it in his journals. This question continues even after the father’s death, when Bunting delivers a misguided eulogy, a true squirmer I’ll allow you to experience on your own.
Wood has filled The Book Against God with well-turned phrases (an older man’s white moustache is described as “a frozen waterfall over his lip”) and memorable side characters (Jane, Bunting’s pianist-wife; Max, a successful newspaper columnist; and Uncle Karl, a kind and wealthy art dealer), but what’s most interesting in looking back at the book is the author’s treatment of the title subject. Bunting’s beef with religion is outlined in a series of statements that sound alike in their firmness as well as their coldness: “Why has He made us so very flawed, and then just disappeared?”; “I don’t believe that any God worthy of worship or comprehension made this world.”; “He doesn’t exist for me.”
But He does, as one character points out, for in writing against Him so continuously, he’s always summoning His presence. (If he wants to bat away a ball, he needs the ball to be there.) In a way, Bunting writes against religion the way Susan Sontag wrote against interpretation, though for diametrically opposed reasons. Religion and God exist for Bunting the same way interpretation existed in Sontag’s essay – not as something to ignore, but as something to turn away from. Bunting’s cold, logical approach to religion is similar to Sontag’s interpretation-dependent foes’ approach to art. Art, Sontag seemed to say, must thrive on “the sensory experience,” which is cast aside when empiricism and methodology take over. The reason I bring up this Sontag essay at all is that in a strange and subtle way, The Book Against God seems to say the same about faith. Its most resonating comments on the subject are not Bunting’s, but those in support of faith – the father’s deep-down serious jokes, a young theologian’s lightly served questions, and, most memorably, the pianist Jane’s humble observations about musical notes and harmony – that they could not have been created by humans, but by something else. For a novel titled The Book Against God, Wood’s work gives the reader an unexpected understanding not of the narrator’s certainty and desire for proof, but of the sensory experiences of those who surround him – those content, happy even, if their faith
