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Arguing with God
James Wood’s prickly debut novel
BY JOHN FREEMAN

The Book Against God
By James Wood. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 270 pages, $24.


ÒNow, there are liars who will tell you that they were pleased to be forced to confession,Ó says the narrator of James Wood’s deliciously intelligent debut novel, The Book Against God. ÒI am not one of those liars,Ó he continues. ÒCaught, I tell another lie to hide the first. I surrender a lie with great unwillingness and feel instantly nostalgic, once it has gone, for the old comfort it has offered me.Ó

And so we meet Thomas Bunting, the most oddly likable narrator to emerge in British fiction since the repressed butler of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day. A seventh-year PhD student on the outs with his pianist wife, Thomas has washed up on the shores of metaphysical and emotional woe. His finances are in total disarray, his PhD dissertation is long overdue, and he’s got a world of unresolved feelings to deal with in the wake of his father’s death.

A lesser novel might focus on Thomas’s clear-eyed resolution of these matters, but The Book Against God inverts this predictable arc by having Thomas become even more decadent as the tale goes on. Rather than spend his time winning Jane back, or finishing that damn degree, Thomas plunges deeper into dishevelment and debt, piling lies thick and deep like a man cording firewood for a New England winter.

One of Thomas’s biggest lies has been about a pet project he calls his Book Against God — the BAG. As his PhD has stretched from one year to seven, this manuscript — a theological wrestling match Thomas conducts for himself alone — has superseded nearly everything in his life. He visits it each morning like an alcoholic who knows where to get a drink before noon, and loses himself in it at night.

Happily, Wood’s Book Against God does not merely reproduce Thomas’s project, but it does share a purpose with it. As a critic, Wood has argued that in the past century and a half, as people have lost faith in God, they’ve put their faith more in occult arts like fiction, to the detriment of both religion and art. What makes a novel great, then, is the power of its Ògentle request to believe.Ó This sounds like a reasonable yardstick for fiction until one asks whether an atheistic novel — such as this one — can still make such a request to the reader. Sitting in a London pub, Thomas’s childhood friend Max asks him a question that Wood will certainly face at some point as well: ÒIsn’t God your intended reader?Ó

The answer, judging by Wood’s performance, is a tentative no. Man is Thomas’s reader and Wood’s too — messy, fallible, struggling man is the person to whom this book is addressed. As such, The Book Against God is free of any preachy moralizing or lessons. In fact, it utterly shuns such easy resolutions.

But there’s a nagging feeling that someone, somewhere, is watching us. And so Thomas does not simply skate by, his religious shirttail flapping in the wind. No, there’s a hoary, messy yawp to his struggle with God. He must continuously refute His existence, the way even the most aloof of black-sheep sons secretly wrestle with their fathers.

It’s not surprising then, when it comes out that Thomas’s BAG is not just a sincere inquiry but a rebellion against his father, a vicar whose no-nonsense acceptance of the world’s woe always struck Thomas as fatuously simplistic. It’d be easy to make this territory feel familiar — the first novel that is a secret argument against the author’s parents — but Wood is too good a writer for that. The more time we spend with Thomas, the more heroic seems his skepticism, and humorous, too. Toward the end of the novel, Thomas describes a bus trip he takes away from his parents’ home.

ÒOn long bus journeys I get afraid that the bus driver will fall asleep at the wheel. I can’t relax while this fear grips me, and I feel compelled to try and keep the driver awake. So on the trip to London I employed my usual tricks. I sat right behind the driver. I could see his speedometer. Then I spent the journey making various noises. I crushed my newspaper, and noisily turned the large pages. . . . I coughed a great deal, and shifted in my seat, and tapped the floor with my feet. Above all I kept my eye on the back of the driver’s seat, and as soon as that head began to droop, I was ready to bring out my orchestra of effects.Ó

The Book Against God is Thomas’s magnificent and pathetic orchestra of effects for the man upstairs. The question this novel elegantly asks, and coyly never answers, is whether He’s even at the wheel at all.

Issue Date: June 20 - 26, 2003
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