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Brainy fictional debate over God too cute by half

Reviewed by: Morley Walker

Posted: 02/6/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

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36 Arguments for the Existence of God

A Work of Fiction

By Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

Pantheon, 402 pages, $34

FULL marks for timeliness to American philosopher and author Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, whose brainy new novel exploits the hubbub around the so-called neo-atheist movement.

However, what she promises isn't exactly what she delivers. Although her protagonist has become famous for writing a bestseller in tune with those of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the novel spends less time with his big ideas than with his tawdry environment.

Goldstein has penned primarily a university satire about the egos and ambitions of academics who populate the highbrow world of the East Coast Ivy League. Imagine a comedy by British master David Lodge, were he an American Jewish woman philosopher.

A professor at a lesser Boston college, Cass Seltzer gets an offer from Harvard after his book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, earns him plaudits for bridging the gap between science and faith. Time magazine labels him "the atheist with a soul."

Perhaps Cass's gender-neutral name is a signal, but Goldstein is not enamoured of her male characters. Cass himself is something of a cipher.

The vibrant ones are the women who have loved and mostly left him, a sexy French poet, an Amazonian anthropologist and a supercilious brain scientist. The novel's largest buffoon is Cass's thesis adviser, an arrogant and pretentious scientific Luddite who speak in stilted and formal diction:

About Darwin's supposed influence on Matthew Arnold, he thunders: "I will not have such infantile slobberings on the sacred body of lit-er-a-toor."

Cass's book, we're told, has an appendix containing 36 arguments for the existence of God, all of which he logically refutes.

Significant other of the Montreal-born cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, Goldstein includes this erudite appendix, all 50 pages of it, in her own novel.

Maybe she's the one who wants to be the "atheist with a soul," because she displays considerable empathy toward religious culture, specifically Judaism.

Cass is descended on his mother's side from a sect of Hasidic Jews, and a large portion of Goldstein's novel consists of back story among the cloistered tribe. One sympathetic character is the sect's lead rabbi, whose six-year-old son is a math prodigy.

Here the novel contains echoes of Zoë Heller's recent bestseller, The Believers, but Goldstein wants to fry bigger fish. Every once in a while, for no accountable reason, she winds up and unfurls a page-long sentence of David Foster Wallace complexity.

With her mathematics background -- she also has published three earlier novels and biographies of philosophers Gödel and Spinoza -- Goldstein includes a veritable grad course on the role of prime numbers and embeds considerable symbolism involving multiples of 18, a sacred Hebraic numeral.

Over 36 chapters (18 times 2, in case you missed it), the plot builds awkwardly toward Cass's public debate over the deity's existence with a Nobel Prize-winning theist.

Goldstein sums up both positions fairly -- would her model be Dawkins versus the geneticist Francis Collins? -- but her story to that point, apart from the intellectual pyrotechnics, is too cute by half.

Arts columnist Morley Walker edits the Free Press Books section.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 6, 2010 H9

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