February 16, 2003
The God Of Atheists
By Stefan Molyneux
Reviewed by [name withheld]
What follows will likely read like a book
review from an already-published book. A
statement in itself. It will also become
clear how impossible it is to resist quoting passages from this novel, given
the author’s brilliant insights into character, wonderful literary flourishes
and stunning demonstration of what is meant by inspired writing.
To say that this novel is a tour-de-force
is an understatement. A publisher with
savvy marketing instincts might do well to change the book title from “The God
Of Atheists” to “Great Canadian Novel.”
From the outset it is worth noting
that this novel is in many of its sections a demanding intellectual work – the
book’s great anti-postmodernism diatribes, for example. This is not every reader’s cup of tea, but
for those up for the challenge, the novel makes for a truly amazing reading
experience. A fascinating mind has
crafted this work, a strong, memorable, confident narrative voice comes
through.
There appears to be no need to shorten,
alter, change or edit manuscript in any way.
The author’s frequent use of lists throughout might be enlivened with
the assistance of some innovative graphic design. This aside, get thee to a publish-erie.
What the novel is in essence is a
modern-day version of the medieval morality tale woven together from the lives
of three separate families in contemporary Toronto. The story unfolds as an intriguing portrait
of adults corrupted by the very process of reaching adulthood – of learning
patterns of behaviour which gradually rule out the need for truth, integrity,
honesty, fairness, justice.
It is their respective children who call
them on the carpet for their inadequacies.
Said another way, the adults are the compromised, fallen and corrupt
voices of experience. The pre-teens and
barely teenage children, the voices of innocence – anything but naïve – stand
out as idealists of extraordinary believable strength of purpose.
Adults such as the ones depicted in
this novel might have been rendered as just scoundrels in novels of an earlier
century and different locale. There is
nothing ultimately unique about the human problem with truth, integrity,
honesty, fairness, justice. However,
these particular adult characters are embedded within today’s contemporary
philosophical/ethical/cultural environment, an environment which fosters,
supports and justifies their conduct.
Postmodernism is its name.
Through one of the author’s stellar characters, the graduate philosophy
student ‘Rudy Fischer’ (aka the Babblefish), the point is made that current
underpinnings of the culture – the postmodern (pomo) ethos – promotes,
undergirds and reinforces relative truth, relative standards and buffet-style
morality.
This novel, as great novels do, gives the
reader an entire world. But it is far
more than a cursory snapshot of the times.
It speaks to the author’s considerable versatility that he seamlessly
works into the novel credible knowledge about the business world, its ethics,
about academia, its insidious jargon and politics, about the music industry,
its shadiness, the cost of producing CDs, the exploitation of musicians. There are authoritative exchanges about high
and low cultures, philosophical arguments, the vagaries of boy bands, computer
programming, and so on.
This author knows a lot and introduces it
well, with novelistic flair, great insight and a tremendous feel for
language. He has produced a
wide-ranging, thinking person’s book.
So beginning at the beginning. What many of the opening chapters of the book
comes across as are strong, finely focused, self-contained short stories. In this way, the author ingeniously introduces
the reader to his three family groupings, setting up in that reader’s mind
well-defined characters. Once the
clarity of characters and their mindset have been established, he then
establishes links between chapters and the characters within.
These are foreshadowed often by the prose
chapter headings, a charming touch (nowadays largely replaced by numbers alone)
borrowed it seems from the early history of the novel. These titles include: “Stephen Grows Up”;
“Sarah And Alice Meet Stephen”; “Gordon Goes To University”. What this also recalls are the text panels of
silent movies where a prose line would introduce the subsequent scene.
The novel begins with the world of Alder
and Joanne and their son Stephen. The
following chapter introduces Dan and Cindy, their son Justin and daughter
Sarah. Al, Greta and their children Iain
and Alice are set forth in the third chapter.
Mike, the young computer programmer and his world, is similarly
introduced in a separate subsequent chapter.
And so forth, as other characters are worked into the storyline.
With the entry of each new character comes
a “short-story” chapter to prime us for how that character may mesh or clash
with the rest of the fictional landscape he or she is about to encounter. This technique serves as a wonderful
preparation for the reader during his/her long, rewarding and engaging read
(889 pages).
Once the author has fixed the full-bodied
characters and their respective worlds in the reader’s mind, said characters
are in turn linked up through various encounters and events with other
characters. Take the example of linkage
when Stephen meets Sarah and Alice. With
perfect pitch for dialogue, the author conveys a tremendous exchange between
them, fascinating both for what is said and how the storyline is advanced.
To return to the novel’s points of
conflict, these exist in several “worlds” – business, technology and the
academy. In all these milieus, potential
human weakness is further exacerbated by postmodern relativism. The principal adult male protagonists are:
·
Dan; Sarah and Justin’s father,
a shady computer software developer who recruits and exploits Mike;
·
Al; Alice and Iain’s father, an
exploitive music promoter, who schemes to turn a boy band into a cash cow;
·
Alder; Stephen’s father, an
unethical philosophy professor, who steals the thesis proposal of a graduate
student Gordon Marrow and promotes it as his own.
Of Alder the novel’s narrator observes:
“Alder’s failure to win over the children –
especially his son, was a great sting, but it is something most parents do to
themselves. They teach their children
with the lazy dominance of absolutes, then defend their own actions with the
lazy fog of relativism.”
As a direct challenge to
postmodern/postfeminist/postcolonialist notions that only women can write about
women, minorities about minorities, etc. the author demonstrates a brilliant
ability to credibly convey the minds of women, to say nothing of men and
children. The deciding factor in
achieving this is of course talent, ingenuity and intelligence, not gender,
race or age.
In rendering Alder’s wife Joanne, her inner
voice and her dialogue, the author offers a portrait of a woman dealing with
the after-effects of choice and feminist options. Through her is exemplified both the
admonition – be careful what you wish for – and the lack of conviction to
prevent discarding what she once upheld:
“…her feminism seemed to fade away, and she
felt herself click into the kind of woman who could give herself to a man, and
of course there was subjugation in that but it didn’t matter either… [She]
cooked his breakfast and there was an undertow, of course; she was quite aware
of it but strangely unashamed: I make you eggs, you make me pregnant…”
Here, as on virtually every page of the
novel, the author demonstrates an unerring instinct for thoughtful, deep
insights into character. There are
fascinating observations, wise conclusions drawn throughout.
“She sensed deep pain in [Alder], a kind of
abstract defensiveness… Certain defenses
can become so well-developed that they become the personality they were originally
designed to protect.”
The author is equally gifted in the
characterization of his male protagonists.
Of Alder, the narrator observes: “He liked her gentleness; people
usually overwhelmed Alder; he preferred them dead and pressed, like leaves in a
book.”
Here and everywhere in the novel are
numerous eye-stopping lines and phrases and passages:
“Dan nimbly worked the gap between greed
and knowledge. There are knowledge
workers, and then there are men like Dan: ignorance workers. The young programmers knew nothing about
business; the investors knew nothing about software. Dan knew little about either, but he had an
instinctive feel for the negative alliances needed to keep the truth at bay:
keep those who know the most about software far away from those who know the
most about business.”
“[Dan] gave her all this not out of love,
but rather [out of] a strange kind of compulsive taxidermy. He refused to listen to any of Cindy’s
complaints because he gave her so much.
It is not at all unusual for such seeming-generosity to be an elegant
way of telling someone to shut up.”
When shop-aholic Cindy enters her daughter
Sarah’s bedroom with the ultimatum to stop her incessant reading and accompany
her to the mall, the exchange is rendered as follows:
“‘You can read later,’ said her mother,
shaking her head suddenly, in the decisive gesture which said: this show of negotiation is now over. It was as if she held a police megaphone,
there in the doorway: You there! With the contented expression! Put that
book down! Move away from the bed
slowly! We have you surrounded! You will
shop!”
There is also the description of Sarah’s
replacement nanny, one with “an almost complete absence of smell and fingers so
rough, it seemed each one was capped with a thimble.”
Page after page, it appears that the novel
has become for this author an opportunity for an adventure in thought – what
stomachs do, how the body disappoints, how the mind presides over the
constipated body.
On Greta (Al’s wife), and the advice she
receives from her doctor:
“‘Because you have to be careful about
causing lazy bowels.’ (This image, of a
pink bowel dozing in a hammock while the shit piled up in the yard, almost made
her doctor smile.)”
The rhetorical force the author often gives
his least admirable characters is often astounding. Al’s diatribe on the realities of the music
business has the power of a speech delivered from stage.
And those insights!:
“[Al’s] ambition was never overwhelming,
but what he had, he had crippled with irony.”
An early reference to Al and Greta’s
daughter Alice: “She was part of the
massive experiment underway in the modern West, particularly in North America,
the replacement of child-rearing with cheerleading.”
Of Alder, the corrupt philosophy professor,
husband of Joanne, father of Stephen, the narrator observes: “The elemental
pragmatism of family life was at war with his dreaminess. All the practicality of flu shots and
ball-tossing and hooking heavy bookshelves to the wall and developing the disaster-radar
of parents with toddlers – all that leaned against his delicate mental
house-of-cards like an insistent wind.”
Of Alder’s selfishness: “Alder placed the
rudder completely in Joanne’s hands, then went up to the crow’s nest to enjoy
the view. Not fair, she thought. Not fair!
Joanne was fraying at the edges, losing herself; in her dreams, she was
an Egyptian mummy; as her bandages were unwound by anthropologists, all her
sacred dust poured away…”
The talent to allow a reader to enter into
the mind of an adolescent who is trying to make sense of the world is on small
feat for an author. The passages
relating to Stephen and his father are sheer magic. The fate of many sons and daughters who
probed too much into life, the drastic steps taken to ease despair and the
observation that Stephen could have been one of the victims yield the
following:
“The extent of this intergenerational,
biochemical war was not lost on Stephen.
It was, sadly, lost on others like him.
Stephen watched boy after boy who, rising and flailing against
indifference, was brought down by the wild jackals of amphetamines.”
At one point, the narrator, referring to
puberty and the onslaught of male hormones as: “nature’s first stab at creating
families is not the most subtle of onslaughts…
This great assault on the fabric of society – all the power formerly
restrained by religion and trigger-happy fathers – now flows largely
unimpeded.”
The narrator probes the paradoxical link
between women’s desirability and the obsession with thinness: “But – what drew
them to this marathon of shrinking?”
There is a priceless exchange in the form
of an advice session on “big city ladies” from Mike’s Uncle Tommy. Dan’s outright Machiavellian exploitation of
Mike – the more dangerous “big city guy” – is performed in perfect pitch.
Again and again the clear-eyed
observations:
Of Mike’s family: “His parents had had Mike
late – his mother was in her early forties.
In Mike’s opinion, that was no indication that he was unwanted, or
accidental. He firmly believed that his
parents had been trying to have him since their mid-twenties – since they
married, in fact – but that his father’s sperm – being his father’s – were in
no hurry. The sperm which finally made
it could have been released as long as a decade before, and just took its sweet
time. You only have to have seen my dad on the highway to understand that.”
Mike’s leaving for college: “His parents
were a kind of still life; it was hard to imagine loving a portrait… At the bus station, Mike got up ten minutes
before the bus had to leave and shepherded his father over to the bus bay. Ten
minutes, he thought, yeah, that
should be just enough for the handshake, which is like watching my father raise
and lower a tiny bridge.”
Mike introduced to Dan’s wife Cindy:
“Cindy glanced up; she was a short, slender blonde woman, part of the toned,
mummified phalanx of rich wives. Her
body would have been the envy of a gymnast, but her face seemed like a moon-map
of all the world’s troubles. (This was
in stark contrast to Dan, whose face was youthful, but whose body was going to
seed.)”
And graduate philosophy student Rudy
Fischer’s (aka the BabbleFish) demolition job on the world of academia:
“The invention of words is the special
playground of specialists. Generally,
specialists invent words for two reasons: to ensure exclusivity, and to promote
insecurity… Get enough weird sentences
together, you’re off to a nifty conference someplace warm!”
All the “POMO in Slow-Mo” chapters are
brilliant, beginning with the first. The
bite of Rudy’s trenchant commentary throughout is a highlight of the novel:
·
On the ingenious difference
between Arts and Engineering students: “They are Lear to the Arts student’s
Nixon.”
·
“True narcissism requires an
intellectual.”
·
“Engineering Students build the
things our society uses, and Arts Students destroy the foundations of that
society.”
Still, it is clear in the novel that Rudy
is an accomplice to a crime, enabling the graduate students he tutors to
“upshift” their language to POMO in order to gain degrees, to publish, not
perish. He acknowledges as much with
particular force in the superb chapter entitled “The BabbleFish Speaks”:
“I know it’s all a kind of shell game, and
I need to spend every waking hour cursing, spitting on and undermining my
culture – in the hopes of being paid a middle-class salary to teach those who
come after me to do the same… We are a
cancer in the throat of the modern world.
We have invented a language through which we cannot be detected; we have
swarmed the halls of academia, camping in the highest places of thought in our
cluttered and twisted tent-cities.”
As the novel progresses, salvos in the war
between the forces of experience and innocence begin in earnest with Iain
questioning his father Al on his business practices: “corruption breeds
corruption”, he tells him.
Stephen at a later point tells his father
Alder: “Dad, I think that you are pretending to teach something you do not
understand.”
And Joanne’s response to her son:
“My
son is a moralist? Joanne shuddered,
then grinned suddenly. I mean, the word is sort of joke, isn’t
it? A right-wing conspiracy. She felt a titanic drying of her tears; she
was a water-planet on the edge of a supernova.
A great black wave of cynicism rolled over her raw heart, like thick oil
over a skinned seal pup. He cries in the night because the world is
imperfect?”
In the end, the novel is faithful
to the Biblical consequences inherent in a good morality tale...