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Summary
Summary
Equally adept at fiction (a winner of the National Jewish Book Award) and philosophy (a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation genius prize), Rebecca Newberger Goldstein now gives us a novel that transforms the great debate between faith and reason into an exhilarating romance of both heart and mind.
At the center: Cass Seltzer, a professor of psychology whose book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, has become a surprise best seller. He's been dubbed the atheist with a soul, and his sudden celebrity has upended his life. He wins over the stunning Lucinda Mandelbaum-the goddess of game theory-and loses himself in a spiritually expansive infatuation. A former girlfriend appears: an anthropologist who invites him to join in her quest for immortality through biochemistry. But he is haunted by reminders of the two people who ignited his passion to understand religion: his teacher Jonas Elijah Klapper, a renowned literary scholar with a suspicious obsession with messianism, and an angelic six-year-old mathematical genius, heir to the leadership of an exotic Hasidic sect. The rush of events in a single dramatic week plays out Cass's conviction that the religious impulse spills out into life at large.
In 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein explores the rapture and torments of religious experience in all its variety. Hilarious, heartbreaking, and intellectually captivating, it is a luminous and intoxicating novel.
Author Notes
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein received her doctorate in philosophy from Princeton University. Her award-winning books include the novels The Mind-Body Problem, Properties of Light, and Mazel, and nonfiction studies of Kurt Gödel and Baruch Spinoza. She has received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships, and she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005. She lives in Massachusetts.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
An "atheist with a soul" is in for a lot of soul-searching in MacArthur genius Goldstein's rollicking latest (Mazel). Cass Seltzer, a university professor specializing in "the psychology of religion," hits the big time with a bestselling book and an offer to teach at Harvard-quite a step up from his current position at Frankfurter University. While waiting for his girlfriend to return from a conference, Cass receives an unexpected visit from Roz Margolis, whom he dated 20 years earlier and who looks as good now as she ever did. Her secret: dedicating her substantial smarts to unlocking the secrets of immortality. Cass's recent success and Roz's sudden appearance send him into contemplation of the tumultuous events of his past, involving his former mentor, his failed first marriage and a young mathematical prodigy whose talent may go unrealized, culminating in a standing-room-only debate with a formidable opponent where Cass must reconcile his new, unfamiliar life with his experience of himself. Irreverent and witty, Goldstein seamlessly weaves philosophy into this lively and colorful chronicle of intellectual and emotional struggles. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Madcap novel of ideas, careening between the hilarious and the ponderous. Goldstein (Betraying Spinoza, 2009, etc.), whose fiction and biographies alike reflect her background in philosophy, has certainly chosen a timely topic. Protagonist Cass Seltzer soared from academic obscurity to bestselling renown with The Varieties of Religious Illusion, in which he attempts to refute every basis for belief in God without belittling those who accept them, thus distinguishing himself in the contemporary debate over faith and reason as "the atheist with a soul." For the prior two decades, Cass had "all but owned the psychology of religion, but only because nobody else wanted it." His book's success brings him a write-your-own-ticket offer from Harvard and an even greater reward: the love of the beautiful, formidably intelligent Lucinda Mandelbaum, whose work in the field of game theory he can barely understand. His success also brings him the enmity of his mentor, Jonas Elijah Klapper, who might be a genius but is definitely a messianic crackpot. "The Klap" kept another protg from receiving his doctorate for more than 13 years and once proposed that Seltzer switch his dissertation topic to "the hermeneutics of the potato kugel." Within the novel, intellectual slapstick collides with romantic farce, as the lovesick professor discovers that "romantic infatuation can be a form of religious delusion, too." It builds to a public debate over God's existence that isn't going to make anyone forget Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor and concludes with the titular "36 arguments" that Seltzer's book refutes, filled with such hair-splitting redundancy that one suspects his was one of those bestsellers bought in great numbers by people who never actually got around to reading it. Always smart and intermittently very funny, but the shifts in tone, leaps in chronology and changes of focus can induce whiplash. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* MacArthur fellow Goldstein, philosopher and writer, continues her many-faceted inquiry into the nature of genius and the intersection between religion and science, returning to fiction (Properties of Light, 2000) and ramping up her gifts for radiant humor and the transmutation of metaphysics, mathematics, and Jewish mysticism into narrative gold. Cass Seltzer, whose field is the psychology of religion, and who is madly in love with Lucinda Mandelbaum, the Goddess of Game Theory, has written the surprise best-seller The Variety of Religious Illusion, achieving fame as the atheist with a soul. But when his old flame, the fearless and irreverent anthropologist Roz, reappears, he is hurtled back to the past, launching a scintillating romp of academic ambition and spiritual conundrums with a cast of whirling brainiacs. There's Cass' edgy ex-wife, the French poet Pascale; Cass' idol, the ludicrous Jonas Elijah Klapper; and a mathematical prodigy, the son of the rebbe in the Hudson Valley Hasidic settlement where Cass' mother was raised. Goldstein is entrancing and unfailingly affectionate toward her brilliant yet bumbling seekers in this elegant yet uproarious novel about the darkness of isolation and the light of learning, the beauty of numbers and the chaos of emotions, the longing for spiritual purity and love in all its wildness.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's novel explores the conflict between faith and reason. IMAGINE, if you can, a novel that imbues pot roast, green beans and scalloped potatoes with Gnostic import - not just evoking the aroma of Sundays past, with their "old orderliness, aloof from all disruption," as in Marilynne Robinson's last novel, "Home," but embodying specific doctrinal precepts and divine mysteries. Reason recoils. Yet, in the philosopher-novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's latest work of fiction, "36 Arguments for the Existence of God," the rotund and orotund Jonas Elijah Klapper, the "Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature and Values" at Frankfurter University (think of Brandeis), proposes the traditional Jewish Sabbath meal of choient (bean and potato stew) and kugel (pudding) to his overawed grad student, Cass Seltzer, as a worthy dissertation topic. And he's not kidding. "All of the dishes have kabbalist significance," he tells Seltzer. "The tzaddikim, or righteous ones, proclaimed that there are profound matters enfolded in the kugel." Klapper, a "Jewish walrus in a shabby tweed jacket" and the author of "The Perversity of Persuasion," among other masterpieces, is given to staring upward as he orates, letting "the riches of his prodigious memory" spill forth. He is evidently a caricature of Harold Bloom or someone uncannily like him. He is also, Seltzer regretfully concludes, "going off the deep end." Only a year into his Ph.D. program, Seltzer watched his guru throw over Matthew Arnold for Yahweh, trading the ethereal embrace of academe for the meaty bear hug of his Hasidic brethren at "America's only shtetl," an upstate New York community called New Walden. Named for the town of Valden, in Hungary, New Walden happens to be the place where Seltzer's mother grew up. She left the village and raised her family in a non-kosher, non-Sabbath-observing home, but Klapper persuades Seltzer to rekindle his Valdener ties and wrangle an invitation to a members-only feast at the rebbe's table. It is after this memorable meal that Klapper orders his disciple to explore "God's indwelling immanence" through the "intriguing mystery of the kugel." Seltzer balks. "There's no way I'm writing a dissertation on the hermeneutics of potato kugel," he protests. This faith-fed food fight leads him to break with Klapper and dig his own rut as a psychology of religion professor at Frankfurter, where he is ignored by the faculty for more than a decade. But in the wake of Sept. 11, as "religion as a phenomenon" emerges in the public imagination, Setlzer writes a book that shows "how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience." He calls the book "The Varieties of Religious Illusion," a nod to William James's "Varieties of Religious Experience." Lanky and boyish at 42, he earns a spot on the best-seller list, a starring role in a Time cover story on "The New Atheists" and an offer from Harvard. Wealth, fame and job security are his; now all he needs is love. His ex-wife, a cruel, "lupine" French poet, left him for a one-legged neurologist, and his new girlfriend, Lucinda, a brittle, competitive game theorist, is out of town. Does Lucinda love him? He comes up with a probability chart to help him guess. A daisy would do as well. Seltzer's rebellions - rejecting Orthodox Judaism, shrugging off the influence of a controlling mentor, and coming up with a theory for the meaning of life and love that excludes supernatural agency - mirror Goldstein's own. These preoccupations recur throughout her work. In her 1983 novel "The Mind-Body Problem," she wrote of a dishy lapsed Modern Orthodox Jewish philosophy student who ditched faith for scholarship, then tried to acquire genius by marrying one. In her splendid 1995 novel "Mazel," she enfolded the stories of a Jewish grandmother, daughter and granddaughter with different attitudes toward Old World tradition (it's the grandma who's the free spirit). Even in her nonfiction, like "Betraying Spinoza" (2006), a study of the famous philosopher who was ejected from Amsterdam's Jewish community for his heretical views, she merged her personal history with her idol's. Now almost 60, Goldstein remains fascinated by the codes and beliefs she absorbed in her Orthodox girlhood and continues to transmit her defiance and doubts to her characters. SELTZER'S best seller (like Goldstein's novel) comes with an appendix that lists and refutes 36 arguments for the existence of God, "formally constructed in the preferred analytic style." In that appendix, Seltzer conducts the exercise that William James called "the darling dream of philosophic dogmatists": devising reliable "tests for truth" about the nature of God and the universe. To taste their rigor, sample No. 20, the Argument From the intolerability of Insignificance, which travels from Premise 1 ("In a million years, nothing that happens now will matter") to Premise 4 ("It is intolerable . . . that in a million years nothing that happens now will matter") to Premise 8 ("God exists"). Seltzer dismisses this argument as "the fallacy of wishful thinking." Or consider No. 27, the Argument From the Upward Curve of History, which begins "There is an upward moral curve to human history" and ends "God exists." Here, Seltzer strangely fails to avail himself of the most obvious refutation: If there's an upward moral curve to human history, how do we explain the emergence of reality TV? But the lay reader need not quail; Goldstein's lofty psycho-religio-philosophical subtext, or rather metatext, doesn't gray her roman à clef about love, Jewish cultural identity and academic infighting. She sews her philosophical inquiry to the material of everyday life. For instance, why has Seltzer's ex-girlfriend Roz popped up at Frankfurter all of a sudden? All the same, the stitches that join Goldstein's men, women and themes show more in this novel than they do in her others. The chronology floats back and forth across two decades according to no particular scheme; some characters are less developed than others; and the insertion of e-mail correspondence and inside jokes can strike the reader as unhelpfully random. Curiously, for a novel that asserts the irrelevance of God, the unifying thread that knots all the pieces together, however loosely, is Orthodox Judaism. Early on, when he was still under Klapper's spell and dating Roz, a budding "warrior anthropologist," Seltzer let her accompany him on a visit to New Walden. Her point of view - personal, intellectual, Jewish and gendered - flavored his. To Roz, the massive synagogue looked "like a Costco that had found God." Seeing the Valdener womenfolk scurry through sex-segregated streets, Roz felt "pique over the Hasidic attitude toward women." Nonetheless, when she and Seltzer met Azarya, the golden-tressed boy slated to be the next Valdener rebbe, they felt themselves in the presence of a genius whose existence lay "outside of natural psychological processes" - itself a proof of God (the 28th in Seltzer's appendix). As the boy grows up, Seltzer wishes he'd been chosen by M.I.T alone, not by God. Yet Azarya knows that New Walden's survival depends on him. "Human understanding will continue without Azarya Sheiner," he tells Seltzer. "The Valdeners are a different story." Seltzer presses him: "Why should the Valdeners continue with their superstitions and their insularity and their stubborn refusal to learn anything from outside? Why is that something to perpetuate?" You might as well ask why serve choient and kugel on the Sabbath. In "36 Arguments for the Existence of God," Goldstein shows that philosophers and scholars may construct as many proofs or disproofs of a divinity as they like. But to people of faith such questions remain as inarguable as the persistence of kugel. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.