god is not great
By Andrew Fleming.
Tibor Fischer, Good to be God, Alma Books, 2008
“What galls me most about failure, is the amount of effort I’ve gone to achieve it”, muses the protagonist of Tibor Fischer’s new novel. Good to be God is itself ultimately a failure, but would that it failed through an excess of effort; instead, the book gently disappoints, failing to fully explore the potential of its initial premise. Fischer settles for a middling meander across well-worn ground, rather than making a bold foray into new terrain.
The narrative has a high quotient of vaguely laddish wackiness; the protagonist is middle-aged loser who tries to turn his life around by trying to make it as a deity in the United States, for instance. The vehicle for so doing – named, ho ho, “the Church of the Heavily-Armed Christ” – is but one example of a somewhat tired range of ‘crazy America’ tropes that populate the novel. Religious nuts and unpredictable cocaine runners, not to mention a deeply unfunny pair of bumbling criminals, are no longer intrinsically novel or amusing enough to sustain a story of this kind, if indeed they ever were. The central character taking this picaresque trip around a sub-Gonzo America further compounds the problem; he is the frustrated, mid-life everyman familiar from a hundred such lad-lit excursions. Unfortunately, to collide two such well-trodden subgenres makes neither more interesting.
What makes this all the more galling is that Fischer is undoubtedly a fine writer. Good to be God is kept ticking over with breezy, enjoyably laconic prose heavy on incidental observations: “It’s the buying of flowers that’s important, not the price.” One can’t help but think, however, that a more ambitious central idea would elevate such engaging writing to the platform it deserved; in this humdrum context, Fischer’s text veers dangerously towards mundane, that’s-the-thing-about-queues musing. Given the scope here for saying something genuinely funny or provocative about religion, or America, the author’s apparent willingness to generate merely a few wry smiles is unfortunate.
It is this literary reticence, the sense that Fischer is almost deliberately holding something more interesting back – right up to the deeply underwhelming ending – which ultimately undermines the novel. Good to be God certainly isn’t a bad book, but it is a disappointing one; the work’s potential isn’t dramatically squandered, but simply drifts away over the course of a fundamentally uninspired narrative. Fischer’s considerable talents would be far better spent exploring more ambitious territory than he does here.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Andrew Fleming is a recent graduate. He lives and works in London.
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Monday, September 8th, 2008.
