3:AM Magazine

By Max Dunbar.

36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Rebecca Goldstein, Atlantic 2010

The 2000s saw a cultural resurgence of enlightenment ideas. A few writers and scientists became intellectual celebrities through their thoughtful and passionate critiques of religion. The explosion of books like The God Delusion into public consciousness was staggering. Not since Payne had high philosophy been so popular with the man on the street. It seemed that a low, dishonest decade that began with 9/11 had made people more willing to question the impact of faith. The debate was not one sided. Religion has fallen back into liberal vogue, and the ‘New Atheists’ were subjected to a counterblast from innumerable pro-faith commentators, activists and broadcasters. They continue to rehearse their arguments long after the publication of the seminal atheist books, and what seems to aggravate them more than anything is that those books sold very well.

All this is a roundabout introduction to Rebecca Goldstein’s fabulous novel. It features a fictional ‘New Atheist’, Cass Seltzer, who has got rich and famous through his book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion. Harvard have offered him a contract, and Cass has also found love in the form of Lucinda Mandelbaum, princess of game theory. Such a scenario, in the hands of a British writer, would quickly transform into a dull satire or morality play.

Thank goodness, then, that Rebecca Goldstein is not British. Her protagonist is not only wealthy and successful but kind and compassionate. He’s a bumbling, insecure, likeable fellow, who can’t quite believe his good fortune, and wakes up in the middle of the night wondering what to feel guilty about. His newfound status is realistically portrayed, given that people always seem to be offended by the tone of unbelievers’ arguments; not for nothing is Cass known as ‘the atheist with a soul’. Indeed, Goldstein’s main strength is her ability to write realistically about human happiness. Joy feels like a shining wire that can easily break. Cass is always on his guard for disaster; by extension, the reader is psyched up against some defining accident or humiliation that never in fact materialises.

36 Arguments is also an intellectual journey. Cass’s life revolves around his friends, particularly Roz Margolis, a vivacious anthropologist, and Azarya, an Orthodox Jewish child with an uncanny talent for mathematics and philosophy. He faces a public debate against Felix Fidley, a proposterous neoconservative defending the worst aspects of faith from the FrontPage-style contrarian magazine Provocation. The character of Fidley is in fact the closest Goldstein does get to satire, and she handles it well.

Yet the biggest spectre at Cass’s feast is the professor Jonas Elijah Klapper, the biggest influence of his undergraduate years, who has renounced Cass for his public atheism. Klapper’s flashback scenes provide the book’s most comic points. Sole academic on the Department of Faith, Literature and Values, he makes one student write a thesis on the symbolism of Jewish food; his average wardrobe includes ‘a capacious iridescent black satin caftan, which was ornamented with a jet-black velvet strip of paisleys and curlicues’; asked to give up some of his vast campus space to the emerging discipline of brain science, he replies ‘I shall not relinquish a single cubit!’ - and you can hear the voice. There is sadness in the comedy because all the characters bar Cass have no difficulty recognising Klapper as a fraud. The sadness of the tension between ourselves and our fathers, mentors and heroes.

36 Arguments for the Existence of God is not just a novel of ideas but also a vivid portrait of the precariousness of living. It’s hard not to agree with the blurbsplash from Christopher Hitchens: ‘It is faith itself that consists of nothing. Rebecca Goldstein, on the other hand, is quite something.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals including Open Wide, Straight from the Fridge and Lamport Court. He also writes articles on politics and religion for Butterflies and Wheels. He is Manchester’s regional editor of Succour magazine, a journal of new fiction and poetry. He is reviews editor of 3:AM and blogs here.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Sunday, March 7th, 2010.