Rarely has Nietzsche been taken so literally as in Ron Currie’s God Is Dead (Picador, £12.99), wherein the deity adopts the form of a Sudanese refugee woman called Sora, and is blown to physical and metaphysical bits by a Janjaweed bomb. Just before He dies, He wishes for someone he could pray to.
That’s chapter one. Thereafter, everything goes to pot. In lieu of any religious ideology to fight over, war breaks out between the adherents of evolutionary psychology and postmodern anthropology. Africans worship the omniscient dogs that picked at Sora’s corpse; Americans adore toddlers, ‘tangible, blameless, and as cute as all hell’; the government struggles to keep people from spending their grocery money on multiple sets of Hungry Hippos. And yet, as the book’s flyleaf is at pains to make clear: even without God, life goes on.
Satires are almost always founded on such ponderous, blurbable mottos. Fortunately, Currie has built a world that’s rich enough to raise God Is Dead above its predictable punchlines. It’s provocative, surprising, and quite funny. The only pity is that the short-story structure Currie adopts feels insufficient to the grandeur of the novel’s ambitions, and much more like a convenient authorial choice than the right one.
In Maynard and Jennica (Fourth Estate, £14.99), another American writer, Rudolph Delson, uses a similarly piecemeal style, but in this case it feels altogether appropriate. Instead of stories, Delson assembles his novel from voices, putting together the New York romance of a preposterous composer and a nervy banker through their testimony and that of their friends, neighbours and long-dead ancestors. It’s like sitting in a bar with dozens of garrulous, charming strangers, all of them trying to make themselves heard.
Of course, being talked at by all these people you don’t know might easily strike you as a bit much.
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