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    36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
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    36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
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    36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
    Ebook533 pages8 hours

    36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

    By Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Psychologist Cass Seltzer's book, The Variety of Religious Illusion, has become a surprise runaway bestseller. Dubbed 'the atheist with a soul', Cass's sudden celebrity has upended his life and brought back the ghosts of his past. Over the course of one week, Cass's theories about our need to keep faith are borne out in ways he could never have imagined.

    36 Arguments for the Existence of God is a stunningly original novel, which explores the varieties of the human religious experience in a story of obsession, consuming love, and divine genius. By turns hilarious, moving and devilishly clever, Goldstein's novel is an exhilarating romance of heart and mind.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAtlantic Books
    Release dateMar 1, 2010
    ISBN9781848875463
    Unavailable
    36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

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    Reviews for 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

    3.5/5

    136 ratings21 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A novel of the search for certitude in an improbable world.
    • 4/5
      I loved Goldstein's humour and obvious intelligence, and I really appreciated the arguments at the end of the book - my family had great fun discussions based on that. The passages which go a little too into detail on judaism were lost to me, however. Goldstein's insight on academia and their behaviour, fears and the way they live and play amused me greatly. On the overall, a very enjoyable book.
    • 1/5
      One star. Oh that's harsh, but I couldn't even force myself to adhere to my read-100-pages-before-abandoning-a-book rule. So poorly written, IMHO, and with such unappealing yet overblown characters that I just couldn't go on. After 70 pages of fiction-induced torture, I skipped straight to the Appendix, which IS interesting in that it lists the novel's 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, along with the protagonist cum author's deconstruction of or rebuttal to each. Better than Dawkins' non-fictional The God Delusion in that this summary is succinct, amusing, user-friendly and lacking in pomposity.
    • 4/5
      36 Arguments was good enough to finish. It was an interesting approach to the debate between those of faith and those of no faith in God. Goldstein balanced the argument fairly and shed light on the issues generously. Goldstein will help you get you to look up from your ostrich like mind stuck in your philosophical sandbox; the book is sure to light your theological ire up and encourage you to join the conversation between atheists and believers.

      She also motivated me to read Spinoza's Philosophy. I am always looking for gurus(alive or dead) to motivate me to think beyond my boxed in existence. Spinoza will help shape my box made of Logos.

      36 Arguments became cumbersome in the narrative, it just did not flow, and seemed to be just another piece of writing about the college experience. (E.G. Brett Easton Ellis: Rules of Attraction.)

      I was convinced, after our book discussion, to re-read the narrative alone and see if my thoughts are the same. The kind ladies at the E Book Discussion are so good in motivating me to take another look, and for this I am thankful.
    • 5/5
      (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)As I've mentioned here many times before, it's always a dicey proposition anymore when a modern author chooses to set a novel within an academic environment: get it right, like for example how Michael Chabon does in his early hit Wonder Boys, and you end up with a real winner, a deeply moving tale that uses the backbiting minutia of the ivory tower to tell a story greater than the sum of its parts, while get it wrong and you end up with...well, all the rest of the million sh-tty academic novels out there that now exist, a million interchangeable stories about whiny, pretentious real-world failures, living in some precocious little town in the Midwest, where they are constantly having affairs with their 19-year-old students and getting into petty fights over tenure with their fellow professors, the product of a million lazy f-cking academic authors who literally can no longer think of anything to write about other than autobiographical screeds regarding how their farts smell like spring wildflowers. Thankfully, though, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's new novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, falls firmly in that former Chabon camp; and since this tends to be a rare occurrence, I thought I would use it as an excuse today to do a little analyzing as well as critiquing, to examine why in my opinion this book succeeds so wildly when so many other academic novels fail so badly.But first, to be fair, let's acknowledge the natural strengths of academic fiction, the reason its fans like it in the first place, which can basically be boiled down to two main points: that unlike so-called "genre" fiction, most academic novels don't worry themselves too much with trying to come up with an action-filled plot, spending their time instead constructing complex and rewarding character studies of the people involved, and thus telling us more about the true human condition than most crime or horror or sci-fi novels do; and since they tend to be written by people who study language full-time and are designed for other people who study language full-time, such novels tend to be written at a poetically high level of quality, purposely ignoring the plebes in order to please those instead who demand that their pleasure reading be dense, witty and challenging. And 36 Arguments succeeds wildly at both of these things, essentially the story of an obscure east-coast academe whose specialty (combining the study of psychology and religion) usually gets poo-pooed by his more focused peers in both departments, until one day he writes a non-insulting guide to the "New Atheism" that accidentally becomes a runaway bestseller, and turns him into a famed pop-culture figure along the lines of Malcolm Gladwell or Richard Dawkins. (Why, he even gets to go on The Daily Show, an event that causes no end of jealousy among his peers.)As you can already see, this is one of the first big ways that Goldstein sets herself apart from so many other academic authors: because even though her novel too is mostly a character study instead of plot-focused, she at least takes the time to come up with some fascinating situations in which to place her characters, and makes sure that her occasional big plot turns all count for as much as possible; because what this novel is really about is not the New Atheism bestseller itself but rather all the various relationships in this author Cass Seltzer's life, and the complex ways that both science and religion have ended up defining and shaping these relationships. Like Chabon's novel, then, this gives Goldstein an excuse to introduce a whole series of engaging, unique characters, ones who literally make the book a little brighter merely becuase of their interesting backgrounds: there is his former Hasidic mother, for example, now a modern urbanite who looks back on her youth with intellectual bitterness; Cass's girlfriend Roz from his student days, a "Singularity" obsessed hippie anthropologist who spends the '70s in the Amazon six months a year, and by the 2000s has founded a biochemical tech startup devoted to the quest of achieving human immortality; his next girlfriend after that, the judgmental and perfectionist French poet and rationality worshipper Pascale; then the next girlfriend after that, campus bigshot and famed game theorist Lucinda, who dresses like a punk and has a math theory named after her; and the man at the spiritual center of them all, the batsh-t crazy yet revered philosopher and academic mentor Jonas Elijah Klapper, who practically needs an entire book just to describe his wonderfully obtuse, utterly complicated personality.The second big thing Goldstein does right, then, is to mix all these elements up, presenting a story out of narrative order yet with a "present day" thread of events holding things together -- and I should mention that on top of everything just mentioned, Goldstein stirs into this present-day mix a coming sold-out debate on the campus of Harvard with a Buckley-type neocon over the issue of whether God actually exists; a child math prodigy who happens to also be a sheltered Kabbalah Jew, being groomed against his will to be the island-dwelling community's next rebbe; a nervy and unhappy husband who's been a graduate student under Klapper for literally fifteen years, and who introduces Cass to the pleasures of drinking at dive bars with undergraduates; and a whole lot more, keeping us always on our toes even though ultimately not a whole lot actually "happens" over the course of this brainy, dialogue-heavy novel. Now combine this with Goldstein's superlative prose style, which manages to bridge the highbrow and lowbrow to a remarkably successful degree; and then add the bigger issues that are ultimately being discussed through this storyline (the purpose of academia, the nature of genius, actual science versus blind faith in science [what Klapper deems "scientism"], and yes, the existence of God), and you have yourself a densely intellectual yet quickly moving book, the exact definition of a perfect airport pick for well-read nerds.In fact, about the only real criticism I have of 36 Arguments is at its very end, when Goldstein (an academic philosopher in real life, who is precisely known for using witty novels to explain philosophical issues) goes just a little too far, penning not only a 25-page literal transcript of an academic debate as the novel's finale, but a 50-page appendix afterwards that is literally a stand-alone philosophical treatise, the actual "36 Arguments" of the book's title along with Cass's supposed logical arguments against them all, which is so academically dense that I literally couldn't get past the second page. Like I said, though, these are the very last two elements of the book, and can be easily skipped by those like me with not much of an interest in the actual academic theories behind this book's plot; and in the meanwhile, with the other 350 pages Goldstein exactly succeeds at what she set out to do, humanizing these issues into a funny, charming, yet always intellectually stimulating story about relationships, religion and family. It makes me wish that all academic fiction would be this good, and makes me want to go buy a bunch of copies and slap them into the hands of every working lit professor I know. It comes highly recommended today for that crowd, and will be a keeper among a lot of the rest of you as well.Out of 10: 9.3
    • 3/5
      Evoked memories of a particular prof in college that tried to create a cult of personality and bemoaned the lack of something in the freshman. This book also evoked memories of Chaim Potok's The Chosen. I remember being at least a little attracted to the Hasidim in The Chosen, but in this book they just seemed like any other restrictive sect. I suppose that I have become more thoroughly secular in the subsequent 30 years. Cass Seltzer seems to be very unlucky with women; to bad he could not have stayed with Roz. She was my favorite character.
    • 4/5
      There were some wonderful parts of this book, at time Rebecca Goldstein is excellent writer, however she seems more interested in writing about the big ideas that she misses the detail of life which results in the characters being flat. still it is a excellent book
    • 3/5
      I stuck with this treatise pretending to be a novel simply because I had NOTHING else to read at the time. The character of Azarya drew me deeper into the book and it is his story that I find myself thinking about. If I am not mistaken, Azarya is a modern type of Jesus and his community not unlike the Pharisees of Jesus' time. What Azarya, unmistakably a genius, chooses to do with his life invites the reader to make comparisons with Jesus' life, particularly how he evolved into Messiah. Worth reading for that part.
    • 3/5
      Meh. The problem with "arguing" about the existence of god is that it's asking the wrong questions. Yes, there are things we don't understand. Let's experience them and accept them and talk about them without thinking we know what they are (god or aliens, et al) or trying to convince ourselves they aren't happening (aka "being rational").
    • 4/5
      One of the funniest and yet serious books in a long time. Great characters set in the Boston area. Goldstein knows her geography and academia!
    • 5/5
      This book is not a treatise on religion as a send up of the demi-gods of academia. Our hero Cass Seltzer is a straight man for his messianic professor to whom he is drawn into a complex web of study. It brought to mind Tom Wolfe's "A Man in Full" in it's skewering of the intelligentia. The book has an undercurrent of very droll humor as he is invited to meet someone at the "View from Nowhere" and he finds it's a philosophy book in the university library, and then is amazed that it's the name of a campus watering hole. I would recommend this book to all Wolfe fans and Jasper Fjorde fans as well!
    • 3/5
      The stream of consciousness third-person narration makes the story interesting if a bit rambling in its commentary about graduate school, messianic behavior by egotistical scholars, and arguments about the existence and relevance of God. The subplot of the rabbinical succession at the New Walden community of hassidic Jews clutters the primary struggle of the main character (Cass Seltzer) with conflicts in his personal and professional life. The 36 titled chapters and the 36 sections of the appendix add to the cleverness of the "work of fiction" conceit. Goldstein's erudite vocabulary also adds to the pleasure of reading this novel.
    • 2/5
      I was hoping for this book to be great but it let me down. Lots of rich ingredients but the presentation failed.
    • 4/5
      The opening chapter of Rebecca Goldstein's 36 Arguments For the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction finds Professor Cass Seltzer giddily contemplating his uncanny luck. His recent publication, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, couldn't have been timed more perfectly. His book wouldn't have made the slightest blip on the bestselling list ten years ago, but a current firestorm between crusaders of the religious right and their nemeses, the "new atheists," has catapulted his book and his career to unforeseen heights. Recent muscle-flexing by fundamentalists has awakened intellectuals from their slumbering complacency ("it's a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again," but someone's got to do it.), and Cass's book is a prime weapon in their academic arsenal against "mass weapons of illogic."As Cass lingers with his thoughts and gazes at the Charles River (he's recently been offered a professorship at Harvard), he reviews the 180 degree turn his religious views have taken during the course of his academic journey. Years ago, during the final semester of his pre-med undergraduate work at Frankfurter U, he impulsively signed up for a life-altering class entitled "The Manic, the Mantic, and the Mimetic," taught by the legendary Jonas Elijah Klapper. Rumors of Klapper's ability to transfix students with incantatory lectures about spirituality, delivered with unequaled emotional profundo, were not exaggerated, and Cass threw over his medical plans and joined Klapper's select group of starry-eyed acolytes.Roz, Cass's girlfriend at the time, bought none of it. What kind of a pompous pedant would abandon Columbia University for Frankfurter U based on the offer of a one-man department ("The Department of Faith, Literature, and Values") and the absurd title of "Extreme Distinguished Professor?" How could Cass expect to succeed if none of Klapper's graduate students ever managed to actually wrestle a PhD out of him? She nicknamed Klapper "The Klap," howled at his secretive name change from Klepfish to Klapper, and refused to kowtow when it was called for.Cass was thoroughly mesmerized, however, and Klapper latched on to him with zeal ("I sense the aura of election upon you") after discovering that Cass was a distant relative of the reknowned Rebbe (rabbi and spiritual leader) of the Valdeners, a sect of Hasids living in a self-proclaimed shtetl near New York City. Klapper, a rapt student of arcane Hasidic and Kabbalist hermeneutics, used Cass to wrangle an audience with the Rebbe. Roz drove the two to Valden (to Klapper's irritation), and the ensuing visit altered the lives of all three visitors, the Rebbe's young son (a mathematical genius), and the possible future of the Valdeners themselves.Gold's book is basically a classic academic send-up with a religious twist that is simultaneously biting and circumspect. Her exposition of Cass's gradual disillusionment with Klapper will have you rolling on the floor (suffice it to say that some pivotal points rest upon an oversized ethnic fur hat and the hidden numerical mysteries of potato kugel), but her razor wit is always aimed at Klapper, never the Rebbe or the Valdeners. It is clear that Gold is mind-bogglingly intelligent (I kept reviewing her photograph on the book flap, wondering who IS this woman?). It is also fairly clear that she rejects religious dogma. Her addition of a 52-page appendix presenting Cass's devastatingly cogent refutation of all 36 traditional arguments for the existence of God probably makes this a safe assumption (ultimately, the reader cannot know whether this is Cass or Gold speaking). And yet, she softens the edges by making it clear that Cass, although confident in his book's anti-religious assertions, is nonetheless the gullible victim of a few secular illusions of his own (there's an entire romantic subplot that I've not mentioned). Similarly, her subplot of a profound choice that the Rebbe's son must ultimately make illustrates that the best path to meaning in life may not always be grounded upon a rational and public rejection of falsehoods.I heartily recommend this book, even though the goyim among us may be a bit nervous about laughing too loud as we turn the pages. Although I would have chuckled at the foibles of my own Protestant faith tradition guilt-free, I kept wondering whether it was politically correct to enjoy Gold in the measured lampooning of her own faith background. In retrospect, I don't think she'd mind.
    • 5/5
      What an astonishing, wonderful, spectacular, deep and wonderful book this! Enriching to the maximum. What a splendid way to relay philosophy, and religion. The writing is absolutely beautiful and I felt my brains expand mightily as I was reading everything. What a remarkable understanding of angst the writer has. How marvelous the tension! How superbly, beatifically soulful and human this book is. I'm stopping now because I've run out of adjectives, but as you can see, I love this book. Absolutely an incredible, moving experience. Wow! Note: the title is slightly misleading. Carefully be mindful of the subtitle. Don't come crying to me if you read the book based on my recommendation and end up with something you didn't expect.
    • 4/5
      Redeemed by the ending. Poorly organized and could have used some editing. Lots of loose ends.
    • 3/5
      The debate over God’s existence as worked into this story was of interest, Goldstein is obviously very intelligent, and there are some interesting supporting characters here, but the book was a bit too philosophical for me. What the book needed more of was Roz Margolis, the main character’s love from the past with a BIG personality, and passages such as the game theory analysis of two people in a romantic relationship, neither of whom has said “I love you” yet, which was brilliant. If you do read it, don’t bother with the appendix, the actual arguments for the existence of God. While an interesting collection, they are tedious in both argument and rebuttal.Quotes:On Existentialism:“I can’t look at other creatures who are committed to their existence and flourishing in the same way as I’m committed to my existence and flourishing without feeling a certain degree of identification, empathy, sympathy, compassion. The intuition that we ought to do unto others as we would have them do unto us flows naturally from this outward move.”On genius:“Genius was a matter of incantatory intuitions and phosphorescent blasts into the dark. Genius was a matter of thunderclap reasons, of which reason knew nothing. Genius was oracular, overweening, and severe. It is left to others to grub around in dusty doubts and cavil in insect voices. … Genius itself is diseased and self-destructive, antisocial and ill-mannered. It’s also the only thing that redeems us.”On God, and suffering:“Suffering provides us wonderful opportunities for character-building. Yes, I’m familiar with this line of reasoning. The only people who push it are the God-apologists, who are trying to make excuses for what an insufferable world this is, even though there’s supposed to be an omnipotent, omniscient, and well-intentioned Big Boy running the show. Any suffering the apologists can’t rationalize away as a product of our having the ennobling capacity for free will, including the free will to inflict unspeakable atrocities on one another, they try to explain with this character-building song and dance. I find the song pornographic and the dance macabre.”On love, this a reference to Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”:“…what’s left to believe in? and to grasp the same answer that the poet had seized on: love and love alone. Love is the only solace. Not just any love, of course, not an easy, superficial love, but the love of the like-minded, the like-souled, the one who hears the eternal note of sadness in the same key and register as you.”On loyalty:“As wild and unpredictable as she was, she was always on his side. That was and would always be predictable. And he was on hers. Even without always getting what her side was, he knew with certainty that he’d be on it, and she’d be on his.”On morality:“When we’re trying to teach a child why it’s wrong to pick on another child, do we say, ‘It’s wrong because if I catch you doing it again you’ll be spanked,’ or do we, rather, say, ‘How would you feel if someone did that to you?’ And when we’re wrestling with our own conscience, trying to resist a temptation we know is wrong, do we think to ourselves, ‘If I do it, then I’ll be flambéed in hell’s fires’, or do we think, ‘Would I want everyone in the world to behave this way? Wouldn’t I feel moral outrage if I learned of someone else doing this?’”On mortality:“’…nobody would want to go back to the days when forty was considered a ripe old age…’‘Forty! For the first few hundred thousand years of human history, half of the population died in infancy and childhood! A third of young men died in warfare before they were twenty. A woman’s marriage ceremony was rape, and she had a good chance of dying if a pregnancy came of it. Talk about nasty, brutish, and short! But did our species give in to this barbarism? Of course not! And we’re the lucky results of the Glorious Refusal, which means we have the obligation to keep on refusing the barbarities that nature is constantly trying to force on us!’”On religion; I admire this one for its balance, since Jewish culture and Hasidism pervade much of the book:“The Maccabees, in opposing Hellenism, were opposing cosmopolitanism. They were religious fundamentalists who might well have sympathized with the Taliban’s dynamiting of the Buddhas of Bamyan in Afghanistan, classics of Indo-Greek art that the religious purists decreed must go, since they had once been used as idols.”
    • 4/5
      I first encountered the writing of Rebecca Goldstein when I read her novel, The Mind-Body Problem. It is an informed, witty and very humorous look into the relationship of two academics and their grappling with that famous philosophical issue among other things. Having enjoyed that book enough to recommend it to others I looked forward to reading her latest novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. I was not disappointed. It reminds me that I have missed most of her writing in the interim, which includes other fiction, as well as biographical works about Gödel and Spinoza. Her latest, however, is a big, ambitious novel that is nominally about God, although it unfolds on an extremely earthly plane. Overcomplicated yet dazzling, sparked by frequent flashes of nonchalant brilliance, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God affirms Ms. Goldstein’s rare ability to explore the quotidian and the cosmological with equal ease. The main character, Cass Seltzer, has written a book called "The Varieties of Religious Illusion" (see William James and Sigmund Freud) which has, surprisingly to the author, become a best-seller. Nobody in Ms. Goldstein’s novel thinks much of Cass’s book, Cass included. But it has become enormously popular thanks to the book’s appendix, which is called “36 Arguments for the Existence of God.” That appendix is also included as an appendix to Ms. Goldstein’s novel. And it offers a coherent refutation of each one of the 36 arguments that are listed. Cass became a celebrity because he made the case for atheism so well.The rest of Ms. Goldstein’s book, the fictitious part, is divided into 36 chapters. Each chapter is titled with a fictitious argument mirroring the 36 in Cass's own book; titles like "The Argument from Lucinda" (his enamored beauty and current girl friend) or "The Argument from Strange Laughter". The chapter titles remind me of epigraphs in that they both suggest and connect to plot moments covered by the chapter. The main thread of the book is the argument for and against belief in the existence of God, The climax of which occurs almost by accident. Cass almost forgets that he will be debating the existence of God with a Nobel Laureate at Harvard, but remembers this commitment only the night before the debate. It is held in "the beautiful nave of the church" at Harvard and sponsored by the "Agnostic Chaplaincy"! I was impressed with the dream-like setting of the debate and the moment when the argument that "lack of a higher authority" would mean that "it all dissolves into moral chaos and ethical relativism. . ."(p 315). This reminded me of Ivan's argument in The Brothers Karamazov. Since the debate constitutes one of this book’s big dramatic moments and is so hastily introduced, it’s not surprising to find smaller plot points being treated in equally haphazard ways. On the other hand, give Ms. Goldstein a philosophical case to make about potato kugel, Jewish cuisine and Kabbalistic numerology, and she really does soar. Some of the humor in the book comes at the expense of academia with Cass considering an offer from Harvard as a result of his book after long being stuck in the backwater of Frankfurter University. Overall, despite a bit of excess complexity, this was an entertaining novel of ideas leavened by sophisticated humor.
    • 1/5
      I read not the novel but the appendix, which is not a work of fiction but an actual catalogue of 36 arguments for the existence of God with extensive rebuttals. Improbably but not perhaps so incongruously, my review takes the form of an extended block quote from Terry Eagleton's review of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion:

      "We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain. Only positivists think that ‘rational’ means ‘scientific’. Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you to be coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that justifies it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed description of you without being in love with you himself.

      "Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be reasonable, but that this is not at all the same thing as faith. Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster. This is not to say that religious people believe in a black hole, because they also consider that God has revealed himself: not, as Dawkins thinks, in the guise of a cosmic manufacturer even smarter than Dawkins himself (the New Testament has next to nothing to say about God as Creator), but for Christians at least, in the form of a reviled and murdered political criminal. The Jews of the so-called Old Testament had faith in God, but this does not mean that after debating the matter at a number of international conferences they decided to endorse the scientific hypothesis that there existed a supreme architect of the universe – even though, as Genesis reveals, they were of this opinion. They had faith in God in the sense that I have faith in you. They may well have been mistaken in their view; but they were not mistaken because their scientific hypothesis was unsound."

    • 4/5
      Even though I’m a person of faith, and even though I didn’t like every aspect of this book, I am really glad I read it. It has some great writing in it, especially the lyrical first chapter. What I didn’t like about it was that the characters were not well-developed, especially the women. They were either caricatures (Pascale, Lucinda) or mouthpieces for philosophical points (Roz). It was disappointing that the main character, Cass, the “atheist with a soul” didn’t turn out to be all that interesting. A reviewer for Amazon called Cass a “milquetoast” and I concur. I also didn’t find Azarya, the Hasidic genius, torn between his duty as the Rebbe’s son and his quest for knowledge, quite as endearing as the author did. The characters of this novel of academia live in a bubble where everyone is Jewish but there truly is no God (one issue the book did not touch upon,but I wish it had: if there truly is no God, what is the point of identifying with Judaism in any way at all?). The professorial characters are every bit as cut off from the modern world as the book's Hasidim in their isolated, transplanted shetl. I also think that the main character’s mostly-absent love interest, Lucinda Mandelbaum, is a a stand-in for (what some would see as)the cruel, jealous, arbitrary God of the Old Testament (so God does actually exist, and Her name is Lucinda Mandelbaum!). Despite its flaws, it is a book that makes you think, but perhaps not as the author intended.
    • 5/5
      I began reading 36 Arguments without much hope of enjoying it. Of course, the same dread filled me as I purchased it since I am often lured by the marriage of fiction with philosophy, though the marriage almost always end up a Sophie's World sort of debacle. Yet, pulled to such book I always am. Another reason I began this book without much hope of enjoying it is that I read some reviews on this site & others like it. The reviews made it sound as the book was filled with "heavy" stuff that required more than the usual amount of concentration allotted novel reading to wend ones way through. I have failed to find anything that has taxed my brain, in fact, I find myself smiling, even grinning an awful lot. The term “pretentious” was lobbed about quite freely in some reviewa. As for that charge, the book is far too slyly good-natured to be anything like pretentious. Yes, the characters engage in philosophic, religious, and mathematic debate, but given the fact the most of the characters are part of academia, it would be odd for them not to discuss these things. I am happy to report that I am more the pleasantly surprised with the book as a whole.
      The book’s plot follows the intellectual odyssey of Cass Seltzer, an atheist psychologist who has recently published a book in entitled The Illusions of Religious Experiences. The book has made him the newest celebrity of the intelligentsia, a role with which he is not entirely comfortable. Nor is he so sure of the tag with which the media has stuck him, “the atheist with a soul,” but then again when one is an non-believer who counts a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem as ones second favorite poem, one is liable to get stuck with an ironic nickname or two. For all his success, Cass has stayed
      humble; considering he is romantically involved with the self-promoting, fanging “Goddess of Game Theory” who routinely lets him know he is intellectually small potatoes compared to her, he has had some help in this regard.
      As Cass comes to terms with his new role as a star of the academic firmament, he reviews his past; his upbringing as the child of a woman who has fled her Hassidic upbringing, his friendship with an angelic Hassidic child with a gift for math, his short career as the protégé of a academic guru (one who bears more than a slight resemblance to Harold Bloom), his marriage to a French poet, and his love affair with an earthy anthropologist. One thing becomes remarkably clear as the story progresses; Cass has a near perfect track record for worshipping the perfectly loathsome. Sweet Cass is naïve and then some. It is his good fortune that his affability has drawn some good sorts to him as well.
      The characters are all wonderfully drawn, it is hard not to adore Cass and his friend Roz. The philosophic and religious themes intriguing and well leavened with humor and gentle irony. It is also the sort of book that makes one want to find out more about other things; Hasidim, game theory…..
      For the most part this book reads like a bottle of vinho verde, crisp with just enough effervescence to give it a bit of sparkle, but not seem clever, that is, clever in the worst sense of the word.
      The book just got better and better as I read. Before I was even done, I had recommended it to at least five people.