36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
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Review
The rare thing that Goldstein does to excellent effect is to sustain her discourse - her arguments and her puns and her jokes and her descriptions and her comparisons and contrasts...are ffervescent and knowing... [36 Arguments for the Existence of God] is, in fact, a lovely dream. --Jane Smiley, Los Angeles Times
Dazzling, sparked by frequent flashes of nonchalant brilliance... Affirms Ms. Goldstein's position as a satirist and a seeker of real moral questions at a time when silly ones prevail. -- Janet Maslin, New York Times
In her cerebral fiction [Goldstein] dances across disciplines with delight... 36 Arguments radiates all the humour and erudition we've come to expect from Goldstein... Hilarious... You've got to place this novel among the very funniest [novel] ever written... Goldstein doesn't want to shake your faith or confirm it, but she'll make you a believer in the power of fiction. --Washington Post
[An] engaging cocktail of philosophy, roman à clef fun, and scholarly soap opera... Goldstein's novel doubles as a genuine primer on current debates about science and religion... --Globe and Mail
A freewheeling satirical tale that is compelling, heady, and laced with a deliciously dark wit... Caustically irreverent, yet provocative and informative without being completely didactic. And somewhat surprisingly, by the end, it is also deeply touching.
--Boston Globe
'Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.' --IAN McEWAN
Dazzling, sparked by frequent flashes of nonchalant brilliance... Affirms Ms. Goldstein's position as a satirist and a seeker of real moral questions at a time when silly ones prevail. -- Janet Maslin, New York Times
In her cerebral fiction [Goldstein] dances across disciplines with delight... 36 Arguments radiates all the humour and erudition we've come to expect from Goldstein... Hilarious... You've got to place this novel among the very funniest [novel] ever written... Goldstein doesn't want to shake your faith or confirm it, but she'll make you a believer in the power of fiction. --Washington Post
[An] engaging cocktail of philosophy, roman à clef fun, and scholarly soap opera... Goldstein's novel doubles as a genuine primer on current debates about science and religion... --Globe and Mail
A freewheeling satirical tale that is compelling, heady, and laced with a deliciously dark wit... Caustically irreverent, yet provocative and informative without being completely didactic. And somewhat surprisingly, by the end, it is also deeply touching.
--Boston Globe
'Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.' --IAN McEWAN
Product Description
Psychologist Cass Seltzer's book, "The Variety of Religious Illusion", has become a surprise runaway bestseller. Dubbed 'the atheist with a soul', Cass' sudden celebrity has upended his life and brought back the ghosts of his past, including an irrepressible former lover, a mentor with messianic fantasies and a six-year-old mathematical prodigy, heir to the dynasty of a strict fundamentalist community. Over the course of one week, Cass' theories about our need to keep faith are borne out in ways he could never have imagined.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
30 of 32 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I came to this novel through Steven Pinker's books. I love everything he has written and Rebecca Goldstein is his wife, a novelist and philosopher and respected academic in her own right. Sounds goods, and it certainly starts out brilliantly. Cass Seltzer is a real heart-throb (famale authors' male heroes invariably are - c/f Rhett Butler or Peter Whimsy) a thoughtful intellectual, keen on sex in a diffident, cuddly, way, notably tall, a best-selling author and accidental millionaire. I then started to get irritated by Ms Goldstein's lack of faith in the intelligence of her reader. Look, Rebecca, if a reader is willing to take on this novel, they do not need things explained to them twice. Such as Euclid's proof of the infinity of primes, Pascale's take on probability theory, or how students might write 'Toga Party' using Greek letters. If you are reading a book and you don't 'get' something, you can reread the passage, right? If the author repeats the same idea twice it is boring and patronising. Similarly, her main comic character is Cass's one time PhD tutor, a Professor called Jonas Elijah Klapper. You've probably guessed from his name that he represents the 'Claptrap' spun in many US university humanities departments; he is also meant to be very clever. Ms Goldstein has a series of characters pop up and explain both these facts to us, and then throws in a lot of the actual clap-trap for good measure. She does occasionally manage to illustrate his insights, but fewer than are needed to justify his appeal to his students. Give the devil some good lines. Somehow Dickens created conceited, boring buffoons and yet made them funny characters we want to read about. Klapper misses that level of appeal. He is meant to be unattractive and pontificating, and he is, and we are told he is. Of course, it is a measure of how good Goldstein is that I even think to compare her to Dickens, but she has this earnest, pedagogical urge, which just stops her ever reaching that magical level of humour and humanity that gives Dickensian characters soul despite their manifest human faults.
The book ends strangely. Instead of the anticipated showdown between the Klap-trappist and his ex-student (Cass makes his break for freedom with the great line, 'There is no way I'm writing a dissertation on the hermeneutics of potato kugel'), there is a surprise debate with a completely new character (Prof. Felix Fidler), who we've never heard of before. He just waltzes in at the end of the book, and has a previously unanticipated debate with Cass, and though this is the sort of set-piece philosophical match that we have been expecting (Cass thinks he 'wins'), this section seems almost disconnected to all the events and characters that have been laid down in the narrative so far.
I think if you were brought up as an orthodox Jew, or you work as an academic in a US institution, and you are American and can take this God issue seriously, you will probably find enough amusing satire in this book to keep going. For an English, ex-C of E atheist, with only a moderate interest in the US's theological navel gazing, it is not quite amusing enough.
So why a whole four stars? Goldstein writes well, she has substance and I need to keep my ammo (1 star, 2 stars) for things like 'The Lovely Bones' or 'Avatar'.
The book ends strangely. Instead of the anticipated showdown between the Klap-trappist and his ex-student (Cass makes his break for freedom with the great line, 'There is no way I'm writing a dissertation on the hermeneutics of potato kugel'), there is a surprise debate with a completely new character (Prof. Felix Fidler), who we've never heard of before. He just waltzes in at the end of the book, and has a previously unanticipated debate with Cass, and though this is the sort of set-piece philosophical match that we have been expecting (Cass thinks he 'wins'), this section seems almost disconnected to all the events and characters that have been laid down in the narrative so far.
I think if you were brought up as an orthodox Jew, or you work as an academic in a US institution, and you are American and can take this God issue seriously, you will probably find enough amusing satire in this book to keep going. For an English, ex-C of E atheist, with only a moderate interest in the US's theological navel gazing, it is not quite amusing enough.
So why a whole four stars? Goldstein writes well, she has substance and I need to keep my ammo (1 star, 2 stars) for things like 'The Lovely Bones' or 'Avatar'.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This book is a good example of the type of fiction that results when a highly educated and intelligent person with no conspicuous literary talent sets out to write a novel. Anyone reading through the Appendix, in which Rebecca Goldstein sets out thirty-six arguments that have been deployed in favour of a belief in God - and anatomises their flaws - can hardly doubt the author's understanding of her subject, and a glance at her intellectual CV is reassuring. But success in fiction demands something more: and 36 Arguments rarely rises to those demands.
It may at first seem as though this will be one of those clever 'list' novels that structures itself around a seemingly arbitrary trope - as, for example, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, in which each section is devoted to a description of one of the imagined cities that Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan - that turns out to be a cunningly contrived conceptual armature. In fact the structure of Goldstein's novel doesn't follow Goldstein's list of her 36 arguments, and the book is far from a post-modernist tour-de-force. What we have here is a perfectly conventional - I almost said middlebrow - novel of American academic life with a strongly Jewish flavour. The point of the title appears to be merely that the central theme is belief: not just religious belief, but the kinds of belief that make human life possible - self-belief or its absence, our belief in others, our beliefs concerning the purposes and values that govern our lives - and the tension between belief and reason.
I feel that the book's religious concerns might make more sense - or at least seem more urgent - to an American public used to a more visible, charismatic and confident religious presence in everyday life than is the case in the UK. At times the book's didactic strain overwhelms its invention, as though the author cannot decide whether she is writing a work of fiction or a teaching tool. Certainly, nothing that Goldstein discusses is likely to disconcert a moderately well-educated reader.
The absence of any real intellectual challenge throws the reader back on the purely literary aspects of the book, and this is a mixed experience. Goldstein has an old-fashioned, servicable but undistinguished prose style - she uses the word 'tresses' at one point without apparent irony - and her sense of pacing is uncertain, so that the reader who wants the rather straightforward story to progress is likely to be irritated by the author's insistence on relating events out of sequence and dwelling too long on side issues. Her characters are life-like, if rather uninvolving, and drawn almost entirely from the narrow range offered by academia: a reader with direct knowledge of that sphere will recognise a variety of familiar monsters.
This is essentially a comic novel - not laugh-out-loud funny, but optimistic and humane. Any satire, such as it is, is gentle to the point of non-existence. Perhaps the book's greatest fault is a certain bloodlessness that repeatedly backs away from opportunities to create and explore real tension. Issues that seem to have sharp edges resolve quietly; characters whom the reader has been given to understand are central to the story are in the end discarded with barely a word of explanation, as though Goldstein had simply lost interest in them once their immediate purpose was achieved. At the heart of the plot, we discover, lies a simple romance: will the amiable hero get the girl, and, more importantly, will he get the right girl for the right reasons?
Readable, but something of a sheep in wolf's clothing.
It may at first seem as though this will be one of those clever 'list' novels that structures itself around a seemingly arbitrary trope - as, for example, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, in which each section is devoted to a description of one of the imagined cities that Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan - that turns out to be a cunningly contrived conceptual armature. In fact the structure of Goldstein's novel doesn't follow Goldstein's list of her 36 arguments, and the book is far from a post-modernist tour-de-force. What we have here is a perfectly conventional - I almost said middlebrow - novel of American academic life with a strongly Jewish flavour. The point of the title appears to be merely that the central theme is belief: not just religious belief, but the kinds of belief that make human life possible - self-belief or its absence, our belief in others, our beliefs concerning the purposes and values that govern our lives - and the tension between belief and reason.
I feel that the book's religious concerns might make more sense - or at least seem more urgent - to an American public used to a more visible, charismatic and confident religious presence in everyday life than is the case in the UK. At times the book's didactic strain overwhelms its invention, as though the author cannot decide whether she is writing a work of fiction or a teaching tool. Certainly, nothing that Goldstein discusses is likely to disconcert a moderately well-educated reader.
The absence of any real intellectual challenge throws the reader back on the purely literary aspects of the book, and this is a mixed experience. Goldstein has an old-fashioned, servicable but undistinguished prose style - she uses the word 'tresses' at one point without apparent irony - and her sense of pacing is uncertain, so that the reader who wants the rather straightforward story to progress is likely to be irritated by the author's insistence on relating events out of sequence and dwelling too long on side issues. Her characters are life-like, if rather uninvolving, and drawn almost entirely from the narrow range offered by academia: a reader with direct knowledge of that sphere will recognise a variety of familiar monsters.
This is essentially a comic novel - not laugh-out-loud funny, but optimistic and humane. Any satire, such as it is, is gentle to the point of non-existence. Perhaps the book's greatest fault is a certain bloodlessness that repeatedly backs away from opportunities to create and explore real tension. Issues that seem to have sharp edges resolve quietly; characters whom the reader has been given to understand are central to the story are in the end discarded with barely a word of explanation, as though Goldstein had simply lost interest in them once their immediate purpose was achieved. At the heart of the plot, we discover, lies a simple romance: will the amiable hero get the girl, and, more importantly, will he get the right girl for the right reasons?
Readable, but something of a sheep in wolf's clothing.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I have never, ever, skimmed a book through frustration with its tedious, smug, pointlessness. But after 76 pages of this book, I had enough. At least through the Appendices I learnt something, but the relentless pointless rambling details of the characters drove me to distraction. I think there's a story in there somewhere, but it's buried in waffle.
I would say that the pile of good reviews this book has received is simply "me too" wanna-be cleverness. I can't imagine how, never mind why, one would enjoy this book.
For your reference, I am a middle aged bloke who likes everything from The Brothers Karamazov to The Life of Pi. This is the single worst book I have ever read. Seriously.
I would say that the pile of good reviews this book has received is simply "me too" wanna-be cleverness. I can't imagine how, never mind why, one would enjoy this book.
For your reference, I am a middle aged bloke who likes everything from The Brothers Karamazov to The Life of Pi. This is the single worst book I have ever read. Seriously.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Tedious and over intellectual and not actually about God
This book is about a hero I didn't care about, two self-centred women he has loved, his self-aggrandizing guru, an OK ex-girlfriend and a likeable rabbi. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Liz
an enjoyable, philosophical romp
I picked this up at the airport out of desperation (it's really hard to escape those chick lit books in the airport!) and was well rewarded. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Galadriels Mirror
An argument for the existence of plot
I so wanted to love this book. There are flashes of brilliance within, but it's not really a novel. Read more
Published 12 months ago by Quicksilver
Enjoyable novel of ideas with some good characters and scenes
This was a pleasant read, with some good characters and interesting scenarios - I liked the way that the 'atheist with a soul' central character comes from a hasidic background,... Read more
Published 13 months ago by Jezza
Sitting on the fence
I am more than happy to read Karen Armstrong and engage in religious debate, but I prefer my novels to entertain and my sentences to be considerably less than two pages long (was... Read more
Published 14 months ago by Ms. J. E. Davis
Self-consciously clever
Having read the rave cover reviews by Ian Mc Ewan and Christopher Hitchens,I was looking forward to having my intellectual muscles stretched. Read more
Published 14 months ago by Lorna Bevan
An original and exciting work
This is unlike any novel I have read: it tells an interesting story while attaching each episode in the hero's life to an argument for the existence of God, arguments that are... Read more
Published 14 months ago by S. B. Kelly
A bit tedious, I'm sorry to say
Goldstein is exceptionally erudite. She has had a stellar academic career and has been awarded a MacArthur fellowship. That is deeply impressive. Some might say (have said! Read more
Published 14 months ago by Tim Scott
A scrumptious feast of mad ideas for obsessives
Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among novelists: not only a big imagination but also a sharp analytic brain behind the scenes. She writes books that reward serious thought. Read more
Published 23 months ago by Andrew Ross
Resolved: God Exists
This is a another work of fiction about academia authored by distinguished philosopher and writer Rebecca Goldstein. Read more
Published on 5 May 2010 by CS Calude
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