The Book against God by James Wood
SAVANT, JOHN J.
CATECHISM OF DISBELIEF The Book against God James Wood Farrar. Straus mid Giroux, $24, 257 pp. John J. Savant If you've read James Wood's critical manifesto, The Broken Estate (Random House...
...Bunting, recalls his father, an Anglican priest, reciting the offertory petitions, so full of sickness, loss, disappointment, and death: it was, for young Thomas, like "hearing a page of atrocious international news," and he notes that, for his father, "pain was not an argument against but for God...
...It is a passion of dismay over the apparent absence of God in a world haunted by unspeakable evil...
...finds his marriage falling apart...
...They admit that...the existence of evil and suffering may constitute a challenge to God's goodness and power-and then they just stop...
...a passion of disappointment over the appealing but inadequate substitution of aesthetic beauty for belief...
...I have always been a bit put off by Milton's presuming to justify the ways of God to men...
...Like us, he is puny before the mystery of it all...
...and, lastly, one of scorn over what Wood considers the facile and superficial faith of conventional believers...
...Has Wood, then, blown it altogether...
...The reader/reviewer may be torn between assessing The Book against God as an act of art or as an imaginative treatise on the existence, or nonexistence, of God...
...In a recent National Public Radio interview, Wood recognized some legitimacy in the criticism that the novel provides inadequate motivation in the father/son conflict to justify Thomas's subsequent deterioration...
...It is in this essentially comedic context, I believe, that we discover the real "action" of The Book against God...
...For all his irresponsibility, it may be for reasons like this that fall guy Thomas Bunting is a basically sympathetic narrator...
...I hear both an attraction to those transcendent engagements which religious mystery proposes and an abiding rage that any God worthy of the name should play such games...
...They're all the same...
...Wood, of course, knows what Weil's answer would be...
...John J. Savant If you've read James Wood's critical manifesto, The Broken Estate (Random House 1999), you will recognize, from its twenty-some literary studies, themes and concerns that inform his first novel, The Book against God...
...And watching the insect, we think: Why stop there...
...But we're talking "plot" here...
...Even more somber are Bunting's later reflections as a man who has delved extensively into the literature of Christian belief-mystery, mysticism, suffering, redemption: I lay on the bed and started reading one of those religious apologists who get me so angry...
...This venture is further complicated by the theological issues that underlie so much of Wood's interest and commentary...
...Along the same lines, I found myself wanting more density and "specificity of detail" in Wood's depiction of Thomas's marriage to Jane, a gifted young pianist who finds a kind of transcendence in music...
...The passion that pervades both criticism and novel is a desperate and eloquent rage over Wood's loss of childhood faith...
...What Aristotle called an "action"-that working out of a moral theme woven on the loom of plot-may help explain the undeniable power and fascination of Wood's writing...
...Why should we need correction from Him who made us so very flawed, and then, just disappeared...
...As the novel ends, Thomas Bunting comes to realize that what his mother and his now-deceased father wanted for him was not worldly success but faith, and he seems to recognize in this desire a gesture of love...
...Or is there not something theologically apt here...
...To this, he responds, "to tell you the truth, this argument still irritates me...
...For the thoughtful and prayerful Christian, Weil comes pretty close to offering an apologia for belief...
...Did not Dante, who played "fall guy" in more ways than one, come to find his terrifying journey described as a Commedia...
...In The Broken Estate, he speaks of her influence on Iris Murdoch, who "praises Weil for her emphasis on 'waiting' and 'attention.' Weil meant by this," Wood explains, "a prayerful attention to a God-like Good, which is necessarily mysterious and beyond us, given to us and not made by us, revealed not to our intelligence but to our love...
...What keeps Thomas going, however, is his almost obsessive commitment to a theological treatise significantly titled "The Book against God" or, as he calls it, his BAG...
...As a literary venture, the novel seems fairly conventional: a young man revolts against the beliefs and values of his pleasantly devout parents and, in the absence of an effective substitute for these, fails to take charge of his life...
...It is a sustained "agon," a wrestling, with the absence of God, the illogic of God, the cruelty of a God who so arbitrarily submits us to pain, loss, doubt, longing- but an agon waged for us not by a champion of faith, but by a self-mocking, uncouth loser...
...In the leap from theory to practice, that is, he not only puts his aesthetic criteria on the line but submits, as well, his moral authenticity to the test of art and imagination-a test Wood believes a truer measure than religion...
...In the course of the novel, Bunting resolves none of these issues-no sudden conversion, no existential defiance, not even a capitulation to despair...
...At the novel's inception, the protagonist, Thomas Bunting, cannot bring himself to complete his Ph.D...
...thesis or hold a teaching position, discovers a perverse identity and satisfaction in random and habitual lying, becomes slovenly and socially bumptious, is terrified of parenthood, and (surprise...
...For Wood, though, she is one of those "who get me so angry...
...You might like to ponder all this in the light of the novel's epilogue: "For whom the Lord loveth he chas-teneth, and scourgest every son whom he receiveth" (Hebrews, 12:6...
...And, although James Wood might deny he's on the same journey, do not the profundity and radical significance of his ruminations suggest that a more "respectable" narrator might, for that very reason, appear pompous, smug...
...Like Kierkegaard, like Simone Weil, shaking on the very edge of blasphemy, they stop the direction of their argument, in the same incomprehensible and apparently arbitrary way that a spider, wandering across the ceiling, will stop moving at a certain point for an hour or two, or even for good...
...John J. Savant is emeritus professor of English at Dominican University of California.ity of California...
...What I hear in Wood's voice is the same hard insistence I hear in Job's, the same poetry (Wood has much to say on metaphor and faith), the same refusal to settle for the doubt-quelling bromides of Job's conventional companions...
...Moreover, when we set antiheroic Thomas against the profound theological questioning that haunts his first-person narrative, we have something close to literary burlesque: the comic disparity between speaker and subject, as when an unshaven hobo discourses eloquently on high-tea etiquette...
...The move from critic to novelist is a risky thing, especially for a critic as demanding and articulate as Wood, a senior editor at the New Republic...
Vol. 130 • August 2003 • No. 14
