The Book Against God - Hardcover

Wood, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224063952 ISBN 13: 9780224063951

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003

Synopsis

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 PhD (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 is suddenly taken ill Thomas returns home, to the tiny village in the north of England where he grew up, and where his father still works as a parish priest. Thomas hopes that at home he may finally be able to communicate honestly with his father, a brilliant and formidable Christian example, and sort out his wayward life. But Thomas is a chronic liar, as well as an atheist, and he finds, instead, that once at home he only falls back into the disastrous and evasive patterns of his childhood years. James Wood's novel brings a new comic voice to British fiction - edgy, lyrical, intellectual and passionate. The Book Against God explores questions of belief and unbelief, truth and lies, the relation of father and son, and husband and wife, in a tone that is at once poignant and funny. Above all, it introduces readers to the irrepressible presence of its narrator, Thomas Bunting, liar, doubter, and the strangest philosopher in contemporary fiction.

About this title

About the Author

James Wood was born in 1965. He has received acclaim as one of the most prominent critics of his generation. From 1991 to 1995 he was the Chief Literary Critic of The Guardian, in London, and since then has been a Senior Editor at The New Republic, in Washington D.C. His reviews and essays appear regularly in that magazine, in The New Yorker, and in The London Review of Books. A collection of essays, The Broken Estate, appeared in 1999.

From Publishers Weekly

Joining the select company of critics who write serious fiction-and do it well-New Republic book critic Wood produces a novel in the tradition of Hazlitt's Liber Amoris and Sainte-Beuve's Volupt‚. Like his predecessors, Wood is interested primarily in portraiture, and the portrait he draws here is of a feckless philosophy student who must come to terms with the shambles of his life. Tom Bunting begins his narrative with a survey of his miserable bed-sit in London. He is in exile from the wonderful flat in Islington he used to share with his wife, Jane Sheridan, who earned the rent from her work as a pianist. Penniless and hopelessly given to lying, Tom has also been neglecting his dissertation to scribble little impious apertus in various notebooks. This he rather grandly calls his "Book against God"-a sort of anti-Pens‚es. The book-and in a sense his whole wretched life-is a muffled rebellion against his father, Peter, a charming, learned, blissfully married vicar in North England. Another source of resentment is Tom's best childhood friend, Max Thurlow, who not only is an important columnist for the Times but has been talking to Jane about Jane's connubial unhappiness. Though on the surface Tom might seem a thoroughly pathetic, despicable character, Wood succeeds against the odds in making him sympathetic and even charming. Muddling through his breakup with Jane, the drift of his ambitions and his father's death, 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.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0224063952
• ISBN 13: 9780224063951
• Binding: Hardcover