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The Book Against God
by James Wood

The Book Against God Cover

Review-a-Day   (What is Review-a-Day?)

"Wood's novel is packed full of wonderful sentences and observations ("crowds were shuffling along the pavements as if they were chained together at the ankles"), but its plot is stagnant. Ultimately, what saves The Book Against God is the thing the critic Wood most fully prizes in a novelist: character. His Thomas Bunting speaks poignantly to a jarringly modern — if somewhat banal — condition: Even the searcher, the questioner, is unable to tell the truth. And for a writer who believes the practice of writing novels to be the act of a modern saint, it can't help but resonate that Bunting has lived his life by creating what Wood sees even the greatest writers of our time creating: imperfect lies." Daniel Torday, Esquire (read the entire Esquire review)

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

A Passionate, Profoundly Funny First Novel from “the Best Literary Critic of His Generation” (Adam Begley, Financial Times)

Thomas Bunting, the charming, chaotic, and deeply untruthful narrator of James Wood’s wonderful first novel, is in despair. His marriage is disintegrating and his academic career is in ruins: instead of completing his philosophy Ph.D. (still unfinished after seven years), he is secretly writing what he hopes will be his masterwork, a vast atheistic project he has privately entitled “The Book Against God.”

But when his father suddenly falls ill, Thomas returns to the tiny village in the north of England where he grew up and where his father still works as a parish priest. There, Thomas hopes, he may finally be able to communicate honestly with his father, a brilliant and formidable Christian example, and sort out his own wayward life. But Thomas is a chronic liar as well as an atheist, and he finds, instead, that once at home he soon reverts to the evasive patterns of his childhood years—with disastrous results.

The story of a husband and wife, a father and son, faith and disbelief, and a hero who couldn’t tell the truth if his life depended on it, The Book Against God is at once hilarious and poignant; it introduces an original comic voice—edgy, elegiac, lyrical, and indignant—and, in the irrepressible Thomas Bunting, one of the strangest philosophers in contemporary fiction.

Review:

"Wood proves himself to be a delectably witty writer....[H]is dialogue is crisp and his characters irresistible while in his lush descriptions...every judiciously selected word carries emotional, moral, or spiritual weight." Donna Seaman, Booklist (Starred Review)

Review:

"[A] silky work, part satire and part picaresque and, underneath, a novel of ideas. It is his own seven-veils entertainment (decidedly entertaining despite a plot more cerebral than dramatic), and it has holes of its own, strategically placed." Richard Eder, The New York Times

Review:

"Tom wrestles disarmingly with metaphysical and religious dilemmas that Wood gives fresh urgency and meaning. Like Iris Murdoch, Wood is the rare novelist able to dramatize the life of ideas and give it human dimension." Publishers Weekly

Review:

"It is rich, and clever, but quietly....The various gently comic minor characters breathe, and the realisation of Tommy's father is wonderful. It has something Tolstoyan about it....The Book Against God is a gifted and winning first novel." Galen Strawson, The Guardian (U.K.)

Review:

"[A] proficient, intellectually stimulating and amusing first novel....[Wood's] characterizations are so vivid, their descriptions so precise, that this book could be used as an exemplar for students." Alice K. Turner, The Washington Post Book World

Review:

"[A]n able and occasionally excellent first novel, filled with pleasures for the reader, flawed by pretentiousness, top-heavy with 'meaning,' wobbly in tone, hobbled, ultimately, by a failure to bring off the grand message it seeks to deliver." Daniel Mendelsohn, The New York Times Book Review

Review:

"[F]ew readers will be persuaded that atheism is one of the important philosophical issues of our time. One yearns for the diverting trivialities of Pynchon and DeLillo. This failed thesis novel demonstrates that Wood is primarily a critic and not a novelist." Library Journal

Review:

"James Wood has delivered an elegant novel of ideas in the form of a mordant social comedy. The depiction of its breathtakingly objectionable narrator is brilliant....For intellectual pleasure, low comedy, acute psychological portraiture, this is a book to savor." Norman Rush, author of Mortals and Mating

Review:

"A passionate, profoundly funny first novel from the best literary critic of his generation." Adam Begley, Financial Times

Synopsis:

Thomas Bunting, the charming, chaotic, and deeply untruthful narrator of Wood's wonderful first novel, is in despair. His marriage is disintegrating and his academic career is in ruins: instead of completing his philosophy Ph.D., he is secretly writing what he hopes will be his masterwork, a vast atheistic project he has privately entitled The Book Against God.
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About the Author

James Wood was chief literary critic of The Guardian (London) and is senior editor at The New Republic. His first collection of essays, The Broken Estate, was published in 1999. He lives in Washington, D.C.

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Product Details

ISBN:
9780374115388
Subtitle:
A Novel
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Author:
Wood, James
Location:
New York
Subject:
General
Subject:
Authorship
Subject:
Fathers and sons
Subject:
Truthfulness and falsehood
Subject:
Young men
Subject:
Humorous fiction
Subject:
Domestic fiction
Subject:
Graduate students
Subject:
Children of clergy
Subject:
Atheists
Subject:
General Fiction
Subject:
General Fiction
Copyright:
2003
Edition Number:
1st ed.
Series Volume:
107-625
Publication Date:
June 2003
Binding:
HC
Language:
English
Pages:
272
Dimensions:
8.50x5.76x.94 in. .94 lbs.
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