In Joshua Max Feldman's The Book of Jonah and Michael Cunningham's The Snow Queen, 2014 already has produced two excellent novels that wrestle with the issue of religious belief. To that number add Joshua Ferris's To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, a wry, intelligent novel that adroitly navigates the borderland between the demands of faith and the persistence of doubt.
A Park Avenue dentist's office might seem an unlikely setting for the consideration of such a weighty subject, but that's where Paul O'Rourke practices his profession, cynical about nearly everything save his beloved Boston Red Sox. One day Paul finds his office website appropriated by someone posting biblical-sounding messages. To his dismay, he soon becomes an unwilling presence in the online world, his name attached to posts and tweets that take on an increasingly disturbing, even vaguely anti-Semitic, tone. Paul's distaste for our absorption in social media and for electronic devices like our smartphones--what he calls his "me-machine"--only deepens his distress.
"Imagine a people so wretched that they envy the history of the Jews," Paul reads in one of his correspondent's tweets. The members of the group who've reached out to him consider themselves descendants of the Amalekites, the hated tribe whose extermination God decrees in the Book of Samuel. Paul is an atheist, but did not become one "so that I could stand above believers and shout my enlightenment down at them." He feels less the lack of God than he does the "loss of a vital human vocabulary." It's that absence that motivated him to consider becoming a "practicing atheistic Jew" when he dated Connie Plotz, no longer his lover but still his exasperated receptionist. Paul eventually learns the tragic story of the religious seeker whose research fuels the activities of the group he laments has "hijacked my life" and he comes to understand their effort is less about preserving some tiny cult than it is in defining the dimensions of religious practice amid skepticism.
In seizing upon both the transitory oddities of contemporary life and our enduring search for meaning, Joshua Ferris has created a winning modern parable. This sophisticated story marks a welcome return to the spirit of his first novel, Then We Came to the End, after the somber The Unnamed. He's a gifted satirist with a tender heart, and if he continues to find targets as worthy as the ones he skewers here, his work should amuse and enlighten us for many years to come. --Harvey Freedenberg
Shelf Talker: Joshua Ferris's third novel is a smart, contemporary satire on one skeptic's search for the roots of religious belief.