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More copies of this ISBNThis title in other editionseBook editionsThe Book Against Godby James Wood
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 & ReviewsPublisher 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.... 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 while neglecting his philosophy Ph.D., still unfinished after seven years, is secretly writing what he hopes will be his masterwork--a vast atheistic project to be titled The Book Against God. In despair over his failed academic career and failing marriage, Bunting is also enraged to the point of near lunacy by his parents religiousness. When his father, a beloved parish priest, suddenly falls ill, Bunting returns to the Northern village of his childhood. Buntings hopes that this visit might enable him to finally talk honestly with his parents and sort out his wayward life, are soon destroyed. Comic, edgy, lyrical, and indignant Bunting gives the term unreliable narrator a new twist with his irrepressible incapacity to tell the truth. About the AuthorJames 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 Boston, Massachusetts. What Our Readers Are SayingBe the first to add a comment for a chance to win!Product Details
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