36 Arguments for the Existence of God

Rebecca Goldstein's 36 Arguments for the Existence of God reads like a mixture of Richard Russo's Straight Man and Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. What is good about the novel is its all too realistic depiction of academia, academics, and academic life, complete with a charismatic, ridiculously demanding mentor, and the requisite boy genius. Anyone who has ever suffered through a PhD seminar taught by horribly famous professor insert-name-here will find a lot to laugh about (hopefully in retrospect), and anyone who has ever felt torn between an elite university and an uber-elite university will recognize his or her plight in this novel. What is not good about the novel, however, is that its argumentative premise--a rehashing of the decades' old culture wars--is a tired debate and hackneyed excuse for a novel whose author has a very real and very elite PhD in philosophy.

With the exception of the Hasidic boy genius Azaria, all of the characters conform to types (and frankly Azaria might be seen as a dead ringer for the boy genius Danny in Chaim Potok's The Chosen). Goldstein is, in a way, hoist on her own petard: she contends that an obscure scholar of religion might achieve mass popularity through a brand of humanistic-pragmatism-lite (which is possible) but counts on her readership to be uneducated enough not to realize that this particular brand of scholarship is old hat (Really? We don't need God to justify morality?), reminiscent of late night freshman banter, and only scratches the surface of the kinds of scholarship done by real humanistic-pragmatist-ethicists. I'm not saying that anything Goldstein's main character, Cass Seltzer, says is wrong, just that it is superficial, old news, fodder for a pseudo-intellectual piece in Newsweek, not the debating lectern at Harvard--a school that has a lovely and extremely rigorous Divinity School where these issues are thought about quite seriously. The notion that Cass would be accepted by THE ACADEMY (as represented by Harvard) is a joke.

Ironically, Cass's girlfriend feels the same way, although her contention that her brand of hardcore positivist logic is really more "valuable" compared to Cass's musings is equally hysterical.

So, then, Goldstein's attempt to juxtapose different schools of thought--the secular humanist (Cass), the positivist (his girlfriend), and the hardcore Christian (Felix Fidely)--becomes a transparent ploy and the novel itself becomes entertaining for the jabs she takes at the academy, rather than for what she's actually saying, which is disappointing, because I don't really think she's the populist she's pretending to be. I think she has it in her to write a truly intellectual novel but, sorry folks, this isn't it.