From the Publisher
"How then, does Wood’s first novel measure up against his own exacting criteria? The answer is: remarkably well. Like Wood’s criticism, The Book Against God is full of ideas, irony, and intelligence."—The Miami Herald
“Wood has written his own big-thing novel, his first, which has to do with literature and faith but is also, happily, laden with wit, forceful images, and English eccentrics."—The New York Times Book Review
"Intellectually stimulating and amusing first novel [Wood] mixes serious questions of theology and family relationships so tactfully, cunningly even, that they go down as smoothly as the scotch Tom keeps hidden in the bottle under his bed."—The Washington Post
The New Yorker
Thomas Bunting, the narrator of this slyly comic novel, is trying and failing to finish a Ph.D in philosophy. He spends most days in his pajamas, avoiding any task -- bill-paying, dishwashing -- that evokes the "one long liegedom" of adulthood. It is no surprise (except to him) that his marriage is coming undone. Neglecting his moribund dissertation, he labors instead on a secret refutation of religion called the "Book Against God," a work that draws a personal animus from the fact that his own father is an Anglican clergyman. The novel's theological conundrums, allusive as they are, never feel merely academic, for they are refractions of Thomas's personal relationships. When his father's health starts to fail, Thomas must return home and confront the consolations -- his father's temperate, generous faith, his parents' happy marriage -- that so confound him.
The Washington Post
This is a proficient, intellectually stimulating and amusing first novel. Wood does some technical things so well that it would be a shame if he did not continue in the trade. His characterizations are so vivid, their descriptions so precise, that this book could be used as an exemplar for students. — Alice K. Turner
The New York Times
The Book Against God goes in a rather different direction both from what [Wood] has criticized and what he has praised. It is neither DeLillo nor Dickens, but 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 Los Angeles Times
On the scene but not a literary personality, writing with passionate intelligence and richly metaphorical style, James Wood has ignored the opaque aridity of literary theory and insisted on the human relevance of classic and modern literature. — Jeffrey Meyers
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. (June) Forecast: Needless to say, Wood's debut will be widely reviewed-few critics will be able to resist judging whether he lives up to his own standards. Sales may be surprisingly lively, too. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Thomas Bunting's life went wrong when he first decided to conceal his atheism from his father, a minister in the sleepy town of Durham, England. Mendacity has now become an ingrained habit. Bunting lies habitually to his wife, an elegant concert pianist from a wealthy family who foolishly believes that he is about to finish his Ph.D. dissertation. Instead, he spends his time compiling a masterwork on atheism titled The Book Against God. When his father dies and his wife leaves him, Bunting vows to be more honest with himself and others. Wood, best known as an opinionated literary critic whose essays have appeared in the Guardian and the New Republic, holds that contemporary fiction, as practiced by Pynchon, DeLillo, and other postmodernists, has lost its moral authority in a misguided attempt to mirror pop culture, which diverts attention from the big issues. Unfortunately, by rigorously suppressing historical context in this work, his first novel, he creates an England that is a politically sanitized dreamscape. Furthermore, few 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. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/03.]-Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An intellectual's revolt against the faith of his father becomes a disabling shaping force in this talky if intriguing first novel. British (now Washingtonian) literary critic Wood (The Broken Estate, 1999) has as his narrator an Englishman by the name of Thomas Bunting, a philosophy professor who moonlights briefly as an obituary writer-explaining missed deadlines by citing the recent death of his father, a respected priest in a rural northern England village. But Peter Bunting is at this point decidedly alive-and the aforementioned falsehood is only one of hundreds concocted by his son, who's not so much a Doubting Thomas, or even a committed atheist, as a lifelong "evader" of truths that confirm his father's confident worldview and seem to limit Thomas's own possibilities. This makes the story sound tedious, which it frequently is, owing to a plethora of conversations between Thomas and his estranged wife Jane (who loves him but hates his duplicity); his childhood friend Max Thurlow, a newspaper "pundit" (who "was succeeding for both of us"); assorted colleagues and acquaintances, and-interestingly-Terry Upsher, a semiliterate workingman whose simple honesty suggests the nature Thomas has resolutely rejected. The title denotes a book (his "BAG") that Thomas is supposedly writing (instead of completing his long-aborning Ph.D.), which argues from design that the horrors of existence prove that whatever God created them isn't worth worshipping. This is of course unoriginal, but it's still the insistent nerve center here, particularly in climactic scenes wherein Thomas is all but silenced (if not persuaded) by his father's lucid eloquence (" . . . if you take God away from the world, theworld is no less . . . painful or sinful or unsaved. It is simply painful and sinful . . . without the hope of salvation or succour"). Not really successful as a novel, but literate, provocative, and at times quite surprisingly moving.
