This book was a disappointment. My impression coming into this novel was that Wood is an aesthetic critic, all-too-willing to skewer ideologically driven fiction. Even my own (albeit limited) exposure to Wood’s writing backed this assumption. His reviews are enjoyable primarily because he writes as one who loves to read and who loves stories. But The Book Against God (which is apparently a semi-autobiographical novel) is weighed down by so much philosophical dialogue that it becomes more of a treatise than a story.
Thomas Bunting (our narrator and central character) approaches all spheres of life through the lens of philosophy and abhors God. He is a sharp thinker, well-read, and completely unable to support himself. While his wife works all day, he sits at home smoking, reading philosophy, working on a secret Book Against God, and ignoring his already-seven-years-late Ph.D. thesis. He is a most unattractive hero, and as the last third of the book proves, he is one of the most despicable anti-heroes to ever make an appearance in fiction. No matter how much you agree with or hate God, you simply cannot like Thomas Bunting by the end of this book. His greatest and last crime is a dive into Onanism (in an attempt to prevent his wife from conceiving), and after this incident, he is completely unsympathetic.
The biggest fault of this novel is simply that Bunting is an inhumane character. He has no sympathetic traits, no good points. An incorrigible liar, you quickly learn not to trust his narrating, and his interactions with his parents are ungrateful and unfair. Sure, they may be imperfect parents and people, but they certainly do not deserve the rage he exhibits around them. Wood has given us a book about a wretch, someone whom no one can love, but to what end? This novel is (if anything) an argument for God, a proof of philosophy’s inability to stand by itself, a suggestion that atheists aren’t much different than screaming toddlers wreaking unrest in grocery stores. Moreover, there’s nothing to enjoy or learn here. This is a book I would never recommend to anyone, because it’s chiefly unnecessary—the only reason I picked it up and finished it is because I’m interested in Wood.
Wood is most famous for coining the term “hysterical realism,” a phrase applied to the verbose, bloated fiction of writers like Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and others. But I think it could just as easily be applied to this book. Its only lack in that category is length: a reader has only to suffer a mere 257 pages of intellectual refuse courtesy of Mr Bunting. But Bunting is certainly hysterical (most appallingly so at his father’s funeral) and, well, there is a certain tinge of realism here: I can’t see someone with Bunting’s ideals have a much better life. Perhaps this is a lesson about labeling; it is certainly not much of a lesson in fiction itself.
I like DeLillo. Then again, hysterics and bloat are two of my favorite things.
Can you make a guess as to why Wood might think that Bunting is sympathetic? It seems to me that nobody could ever create a character, give him a name, and write for him a world unless he felt some love for him. Just thinking about what art is — creating, as God created, in our own image — I imagine that from the writer’s perspective, sympathetic, empathetic, and egopathetic characters are unavoidable.
A character that sins for no good reason at all, one who sins for sin’s sake, isn’t necessarily unsympathetic. Augustine stole pears. Is there room for evil and stupid men in our stories? It seems to me that you require something to like in a character, but could you settle for something to hate about him that you also hate about yourself?
Chris,
That’s the rub: as my follow-up post says, I can’t imagine what Wood is trying to do with Bunting’s character. He is selfish through and through. My only guess is that, because this is supposedly an “autobiographical novel” (source: Wikipedia), Wood felt like this was something he had to work out.
I don’t have a problem with novels about people sinning. But I think that in order to make a satisfying novel, you have to have some sort of direction, some kind of change, some kind of growth. At the end of this book, I felt like I’d been duped into finishing it: Bunting hasn’t begun to see that the real problem is his own bloody self. What he would really like is to go back to childhood, to days when he was free from responsibility. I’m assuming that you don’t have to a Christian to find that insufferable.
And yes, I can settle for something to hate about a character that I hate about myself. Lewis does that very well in Till We Have Faces. But you have to uncover something, not glory or wallow in it. Wood very solidly does the latter.
Frank,
I agree with you insofar as I believe that good stories typically have some sort of arc. You’ve thought more about this type of stuff than I have, but I’m uncomfortable with saying that a story that doesn’t go anywhere is a bad story.
The Killers don’t go anywhere, and yet you choose to defend them. Virtually no pop music “uncovers something.” A still life or a photograph will not go anywhere. All would be considered art: representative, communicative, and dare I say worthwhile. I’ve always thought that the value in these types of things is that they have resonance: I recognize what they depict, and the artist has provided me a moment to consider this shared bit of human existence in more detail. He has caught my attention. He has taught me to slow down. I might not learn much from apples by looking at a painting of one. Interaction with the art is the important thing.
It’s equivocation, of course, to say that good stories and good snapshots will have similar characteristics; that being said, what’s wrong with saying that Wood hasn’t written a story so much as he’s painted an epic still-life?
Chris,
Perhaps you’re mixing genres too much. If a story has no movement—if it’s the “epic still-life” you suggested—is it still a story? Because anything that has a beginning and an end *must* have movement. How else do you get from Point A to Point B?
Now, let’s say I demanded that very same thing of a painting, or a snapshot. Where’s the beginning and end of the Mona Lisa? Well, of course, that’s an unfair demand to make: it’s a different form of art.
Does all art have to have movement or a beginning/an end to be worthwhile? No. But a story must: otherwise, it’s simply not a story.
F, the last paragraph of my comment admitted everything you’ve just said. I called it “equivocation” to expect the same things from stories and snapshots, and I even suggested that Wood hasn’t written a story.
I was inviting you to imagine for a second that this book isn’t a “story,” at least insofar as you rigidly define them, and instead try to seek other merits in it. When we look at art in general, what you’re calling “movement” is difficult to find in anything but story; yet art moves us and changes us and makes our lives better.
There is a movement to the Mona Lisa, and there is a beginning and an end. The “story” of the Mona Lisa is your interaction with her. Every good artist knows the habits of the eye, and paints in such a way as to direct the viewer through the canvas. They include points of interest at key foci in the painting; they use light and color and contrast to make it an experience, a brief but valuable moment of tension and release.
Music is driven by the same principles. Meter and timbre and dynamics – melody and harmony too, of course – work together to create tension and release. There is a story and a moral to music, some sort of necessary end. If you don’t believe me, pick up a guitar, strum a D7 until you get sick of the chord, and then strum a G. Tell me it isn’t about the best feeling in the world. That’s because of the order in music. The V7 chord resolves to the I chord. That’s just the way it is. If the artist does something else, it’s interesting, it’s defiant, it’s moving. It’s movement, just not as you have defined it. It’s a moral, just not pureed morals on a rubberized spoon. Have you necessarily learned anything or been changed by listening to The Killers? Is it bad music? Is it bad art?
I am out on the skinny branches here, having never read a book that may just actually be horrible, but I’m arguing that you’ve essentially labeled Wood’s work as a “story,” then defined “story” as something that Wood hasn’t done. It’s begging the question. If you want to define story as something curvy, with movement and conflict and climax and resolve, I’m Ok with that, and in fact I’d agree. But there are so many other genres of art, even literature in particular, that I wonder if Wood isn’t up to something else entirely.
Chris,
First, I’m not the one who labeled Wood’s book a “story.†He did that himself when he called it “a novel.†(Which is, in fact, written on the front cover, almost as a subtitle.) As such, I think my criticisms are both valid and pertinent.
Second, I think you’ve misinterpreted my question, “Where is the beginning and end of the Mona Lisa?†Though I’m no expert in painting , I’m fully aware that there are techniques, patterns, styles, etc., which dictate its form (or lack thereof). What I was pointing out is that a story’s “beginning†and “end†are unique: they inherently communicate movement from one to the other. I’d even suggest that if you want to think about “beginning†and “end†in paintings and photographs, you’re borrowing from story.
Third, I was very careful in my initial comment *not* to say that music has no beginning or end, because it very obviously does. Further, I’m not sure why suggest that an unconventional artist (moving from a V7 chord to something other than the I) is performing movement, but not movement “as [I] have defined it.†My complaint with Wood is not that his movement is unconventional, but simply *that there is none.* By my reading, Thomas Bunting at the end of the book is no different than he was at the beginning.
Fourth, I have *never* asked for pureed morals. I demand that you take that implication back.
Fifth, my primary complaint has nothing to do with genre or styling. Even if Wood is (as you suggest) trying to do something different, I would let all my objections stand. I’m not sorry that I read it, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else. And that’s really all I was trying to communicate.
@F – The big problem here is that I, not having read the book, am spewing abstract platitudes that don’t have any significant mooring to your real, non-abstract objections to Wood’s book. I think it would be best for me to read the book. This will, of course, probably result in me hating it also, and it will rob us of all of our fun.
My real interest in this discussion is related to a minor scuffle a few years ago relating to Josh G’s story China Dolls. There were a number of folks who objected to his short story, saying that because it didn’t contain a resurrection, it wasn’t a story at all. I disagreed strongly then, and I disagree strongly now. I’m as a result wary of arguments that start with a definite idea of “story” and then criticize things that don’t conform to that pattern. It begs the question and often distracts from other, more interesting (to me at least) problems being discussed. I’m not arguing that you are doing that so much as I’m trying to figure out how your criticisms interact with my particular philosophical pet-peeve.
A lot of this is also rooted in my love of existential and postmodern fiction. To take an easy example, Camus’ The Stranger works from the premise that we should live without regrets. That, combined with traces of nihilism, results in stories where the protagonist often doesn’t change; the whole point of the story is to watch how the resiliency of the human spirit is reconciled to a meaningless world. That the protagonist doesn’t change is by and large what makes the story work.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime is another example I use pretty often. The hero is a young autistic boy, and much of the tension comes from how the way he is conflicts with the world around him. He doesn’t change – he can’t – and the story is still enjoyable because you can watch how he bends the way the world is to get through his day without having his head explode.
Debating the merits of these books is probably outside of this discussion here, but at least you now know my motives. You also have reason to suspect that I’m a little unhinged: The Stranger is not exactly what you’d call uplifting Christian fiction, but it was pivotal in shaping who I became during and after high school.
To your fourth point, I gladly retract any and all suggestion I have made that you like baby-food morals. Going back and reading it, I can how the structure obviously leads to that understanding. I fell in love with the image and got carried away. For the record, I know that you’re a fan of a rigorous and robust morality. I was just spastically making the point that music has an inherent morality, but it’s far more subtle than what you’ll find in a lot of literature, even some of the best. Wagner subverted the whole of Western Christian Mores just by ditching modality, and did it intentionally, and did it right under our noses.
So yeah, if you’ll let me borrow the book, I’d be happy to read it.
Chris,
I was not upset with you at all: my fourth point was intended to be overstated hyperbole, which I had hoped would be read (as I say in my bio) playfully. My apologies for not making that clearer.
Your comments give me more context, and I’ll be more than happy to lend you the book. I’m also going to “re-review” the book with your comments in mind, hopefully explaining why I even bothered to write about it in the first place and why I’ve chosen to argue with you about it.
That will come later, though. For now, I’m going to go and take so playing lessons.
Cheerio.
Hello F:
I agree that Book Against God is a poor novel. But I’m not a fan of Wood’s criticism, either. He’s indeed often taken, as you describe him, as “an aesthetic critic,” but I think that if you scratch the surface you’ll find that in fact he’s got a deeply ideological and even “agenda-driven” approach (see his recent reviews of Saramago and Bolano). He’s not against “ideologically-driven” fiction, he just wants his ideology in the driver’s seat. Stop by the Contra James Wood blog sometime and check out the analysis there:
http://contrajameswood.blogspot.com/
Cheers!
EC:
Thanks for the link. I’ll definitely peruse the blog.
I’m not as opposed to Wood as you are, if only because I love his writing. His criticism, even if you are vehemently opposed to it (which I am, at times), sounds like the criticism of a man who loves to read, who loves fiction dearly. And for that, I’m willing to give him some slack.
I’ll let you know what I think of the blog.