July
9, 2003, 10:35 a.m.
Against the World
James Wood’s
The Book Against God.
By Matthew
Feeney
he Book
Against God is the first novel by James Wood, a rigorous and sometimes
merciless British literary critic who now lives and writes in the U.S.
Many critics have prefaced their reviews of the novel with predictable
noodlings about the critic-novelist reversal involved (the hunter now
being the hunted, and so on). Since Wood's admirable (if vaguely fanatical)
aesthetic seriousness sometimes enables a portentous critical style, though,
another matter actually seems more important: Can Wood write fictional
prose good enough to sustain a readable novel? The answer is yes and no
(and yes). Wood is not a great, or at least consistently great, prose
stylist, but his first novel is nonetheless a gratifying success —
a droll domestic comedy that flowers into a heartbreaking Oedipal drama,
which itself contains a challenging and bleakly funny story of a thoroughly
botched philosophical quest.
The Book Against
God takes its title from a quixotic work in progress, an episodic anti-theological
polemic written by our narrator, Tom Bunting, a philosophy grad student
at University College, London. The God book (abbreviated as the BAG) is
a distraction from the doctoral thesis he tells everybody he's just about
done with, which is just one of his many lies. In building his first novel
around hapless and morally compromised intellectual, a dislikeable schlub,
Wood is working within an archetype almost uncomfortably familiar in contemporary
fiction. And as The Book Against God begins, it seems to confirm
worries that Tom, the cynical, unreliable guide, is a bit too pat, too convenient
a stand-in for Wood himself, the philosophical literary critic and anti-God
polemicist (Wood has aired several arguments similar to those made by his
narrator here).
It is in the early
chapters, when you're not sure just how contrived Tom Bunting feels as
a character and narrator, that Wood's prose feels the most tentative,
and his figurative efforts fall short or overreach, or just run wide of
the mark. It's as if he's not only writing his way into his main character.
He's also groping toward a whole narrative approach. In describing the
modest financial means of his parents, Tom notes, "All our textures
were strained through the sieve of their finances." Laden with one
abstraction too many ("our textures") this metaphor sounds vaguely
mixed, even if, technically, it isn't. And when, watching his future wife
Jane play the piano for the first time, he notes the contrast between
her childishly skinny limbs and "the more rounded, certainly adult
deposit on which she sat," he's chosen to push the figurative emphasis
in a truly unfortunate direction. When you refer to a woman sitting on
an "adult deposit," you can't control the associations whereby
readers are moved to hope, more or less automatically, that she's also
wearing an adult diaper.
But the introduction of Jane soon shows that Wood has a lot more up his
sleeve than just a narcissistic smart-aleck narrator. Tom's various loved
ones — wife Jane, his best friend Max, his parents — reveal
a curious dramatic role for the narrator himself. Tom, the irresponsible,
lying, infantile protagonist becomes not so much an object of our sympathy
as a conduit through which we sympathize, powerfully, with the other people
in his life. His wife Jane, a concert pianist and music teacher with a
soft spot for Beethoven, is enough of a romantic to be drawn to Tom's
rebelliousness but, finally, too levelheaded to tolerate his dishonesty
and laziness. Max, a phlegmatic newspaper columnist, has managed to turn
a cerebral disposition into a viable profession. Max's reconciliation
of mind and world is a dire threat to Tom, who wants the intellectual
passion he has shared with Max since they were teenagers to excuse him
from all worldly obligations. Most important is Tom's father, Peter, a
happy, intellectually resourceful Anglican priest tending to a small but
devoted flock in the northern English village of Sunderhall. Several key
questions about Tom hinge on his relationship with his father — whether
his beef with God is actually a struggle against his devout father, whether
his conflict with his devout father is merely an irrational outgrowth
of his hatred of the idea of God, or whether his conflicts with both his
father and God are merely displacements of a more prosaic rage against
the material world itself.
For that seems to
be Tom's real problem, a deep revulsion at the quotidian claims that the
world makes upon him. Early on he laments, "Whenever I sign a cheque
for some idiot company or other, I feel a little like a man in an electric
chair or hospital bed, streaming with wires and connections and linkages."
It would seem more common to strive toward otherworldliness through
belief in God, but Tom operates differently. For him, belief in God is
a way of sanctifying all these ugly and soul-compromising "connections
and linkages," a way of underwriting metaphysically the world's grimy
sovereignty over him. Raging at God is a way for him to question this
sovereignty, and thus to justify his leave-taking from the responsibilities
that everyone else accepts. This makes Peter, whose faith has left him
both at home in the world and spiritually content, an inviting target
for Tom's resentments. Tom's inability to disentangle his genuine love
for his father from these existential resentments leads to the novel's
emotionally gruesome climax — Tom's disastrous eulogy at Peter's
funeral.
This assortment of
mostly gentle antagonisms, involving a borderline loathsome character,
gathers into a diverting and humane story thanks to Wood's surprising
technical strengths. For a book in which Tom's obsession with theological
disputation hovers over every relationship, there is nothing stagey or
pedantic about the dialogue. Tom's friends and family try energetically
to pull him out his BAG and into the world that they inhabit, and these
encounters, though never hilarious, are always droll and real and propelled
by a palpable sense of desperation. And the novel's shambling back-and-forth
structure masks a sly dramatic sense.
It was brave of Wood,
who has embraced the heroic and quixotic and somewhat ridiculous enterprise
of arguing against God, to take as the subject matter of his first novel
the comical and nihilistic tendencies of that enterprise. He also gets
credit, not incidentally, for turning this subject matter into a touching
and intellectually nourishing work of fiction.
— Matthew Feeney is a freelance writer in
Washington, D.C.
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