Perhaps you know the feeling: you obtain a copy of a book you've seen praised to the skies by reviewers, it's as thick as a brick, you find a couple of hours to get started, and you look at how many pages remain and lose heart. (That happened to me with David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, for example.) Gods Without Men is creative and unconventional, laying out several parallel stories that span several centuries, and the author shifts tone and diction effectively as he runs his literary time machine. But it just didn't seem to be going anywhere in the first hundred pages.
And then it did. The different stories become more interesting, even if some of the characters remain ciphers. The overarching themes -- something about communicating with other civilizations that are observing us from elsewhere in the universe, something about Native American spirituality, something about drugs and trickster figures -- are sketched in lightly. In some of the concluding sections a central character seems to be discovering a religious reality to which she had previously been blind. But this is all rather fuzzy, and it's hard to take seriously.
In the end I was not sorry I took the time to finish the book. (Not that much time: I began it while traveling last week, then decided yesterday evening to give it another chance and finished it after church today.) It's not really about gods, and maybe not about men: it's about a rock formation in the Mojave Desert that may or may not have some unique capacity as a passageway to other worlds, and about people who experience it in that way in the 19th and 20th and 21st centuries. This is the first novel I've read by Kunzru. His writing is fluid and expressive, and his ability to convey different sorts of worlds through his character's eyes and minds is impressive. And although I'm not sure it deserves the rave reviews it got, it's an interesting work.
And then it did. The different stories become more interesting, even if some of the characters remain ciphers. The overarching themes -- something about communicating with other civilizations that are observing us from elsewhere in the universe, something about Native American spirituality, something about drugs and trickster figures -- are sketched in lightly. In some of the concluding sections a central character seems to be discovering a religious reality to which she had previously been blind. But this is all rather fuzzy, and it's hard to take seriously.
In the end I was not sorry I took the time to finish the book. (Not that much time: I began it while traveling last week, then decided yesterday evening to give it another chance and finished it after church today.) It's not really about gods, and maybe not about men: it's about a rock formation in the Mojave Desert that may or may not have some unique capacity as a passageway to other worlds, and about people who experience it in that way in the 19th and 20th and 21st centuries. This is the first novel I've read by Kunzru. His writing is fluid and expressive, and his ability to convey different sorts of worlds through his character's eyes and minds is impressive. And although I'm not sure it deserves the rave reviews it got, it's an interesting work.
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