In Father and Son, Edmund Gosse’s great memoir of his Victorian childhood, he writes of the event that first made him aware of his own self as independent being—and set him on the path away from the faith of his father: “My Mother always deferred to my Father, and in his absence spoke to me, as if he were all-wise. I confused him in some sense with God; at all events I believed that my Father knew everything and saw everything.” One day, Gosse heard his father relate an anecdote of an occurrence at which mother and son had been present. “I remember turning quickly, in embarrassment, and looking into the fire. The shock to me was as that of a thunderbolt, for what my Father said ‘was not true.’”
Gosse’s work comes early to mind while reading James Wood’s first novel, The Book Against God. Its narrator is a variation on the same theme. Thomas Bunting is the son of an Anglican minister. He is pursuing (and never quite completing) a Ph.D. in philosophy, but still regards his father with a combination of annoyance and awe. Though Thomas claims to have rarely seen him open a book, his father displays ready knowledge of everything from Montaigne to Schumann. “The mere display of that knowledge sufficed to subdue me,” he writes, recalling a discussion they once had on some issue of morality:
I must have said something rash, for Peter calmly responded: “That’s rather a postmodern idea, I think, this collapsing of all hierarchies.” The argument ended there, for suddenly he was describing my thoughts to me! … He didn’t need to read any books of postmodernism; he just absorbed this information swiftly and mercilessly.
For all his casual omniscience, however, what the father doesn’t know is that his son has lost his faith. It is worse that that: He has become one of those who, in the words of Job, “desire to argue with God” and is secretly at work on a voluminous philosophical work he calls the “Book Against God” (his “BAG”). The BAG is Thomas’s attempt to best his father and his faith; The Book Against God is the story of his frustration at his failure to do so.
Yet Wood’s is not a merciless work like Father and Son or The Way of All Flesh, it is rather a deeply comic novel and a clever inversion of a conventional narrative. Peter Bunting is not overbearing or Puritanical. He is kind to the poor and lonely of his parish, married happily to Thomas’s mother, and has a healthy sense of humor. (He has affixed to each of his bibles a sticker reading, “This is an advance copy sent in lieu of a proof.”) Wood recognizes that for the past century disbelief in God has been an easier alternative than belief for an intelligent person, that there is no great heroism inherent in the decision to disbelieve, and that the loss of faith frequently entails the loss of a great many other valuable things, as well.
Wood is in the peculiar situation for a first-time novelist of having a great deal of information about his own beliefs, on issues of both metaphysics and the creation of fiction, available to his readers. Over the past decade, he established himself as the premier young critic of English-language fiction—it is probably past time now to drop that “young.” Among other admirable traits, he is one of few critics who still regularly engage the technical points of prose fiction, such as narrative distance, who is willing to take an author like John Updike to task over something as mundane as word choice.
Given his fondness for matters of mechanics, it should come as no surprise that The Book Against God is well-written. His writing stays in the service of character and does not worship at the cult of the sentence. The author’s social commentary, both regarding his parent’s Durham parishioners and Thomas’s more sophisticated London friends, is precise and funny.
This humor, in particular, may seem surprising in a book whose central reference point is Job. But the hero of a comic novel is always a sort of Job, beset by his creator with trials and afflictions. Wood has fastened onto this parallel, and draws from it rich ironic effects. Thomas takes issue with God (and Kierkegaard, whom he calls by the transliterative nickname “Churchyard”) over what C. S. Lewis called the problem of pain—how can a God who loves us allow us to suffer?—but his own trials are, for the most part, amusingly minor, usually having to do with telling lies to get out of dinner engagements. There is more of Jim Dixon in him than of Ivan Karamazov.
Yet Thomas’s course in the novel does parallel that of Job: By the end of it, he has lost his father, separated from his wife, and become alienated from his closest friend. (Only belatedly does he begin to see himself—and the growing obsession with his BAG—as the cause of most of these misfortunes.) Thomas even sarcastically describes his preoccupation with religious belief as a sort of physical affliction, a scab he can’t get rid of. This is the closest he comes to explaining why, if he does not believe in God, he argues with him so fiercely.
The main, though minor, flaw of the novel is that Thomas does not argue particularly well. In the title essay of his book The Broken Estate, Wood wrote of how, at the age of fifteen, “I tore myself away from belief in God.” The Book Against God seems in many ways to be a parody of his own adolescent certainties. In doing this, he perhaps hoped to insulate himself from what he considers a cardinal sin of fiction writing: the confusion of author and narrator (worst of all in the mind of author himself). No reader is likely to confuse Thomas Bunting with James Wood for the simple reason that he is nowhere near as intelligent; Wood has made him in his image, but withheld the spark.
One will most likely not be able to accuse James Wood of intellectually holding back ever again. His willingness in this debut novel to attack his own pieties, along with those of everyone else, suggests that he is as honest an artist as he is a critic, and that his next will be worth waiting for.