The Magazine

God and Mr. Wood

James Woods's religion-haunted novel.

Aug 18, 2003, Vol. 8, No. 46 • By ALAN JACOBS
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The Book Against God

by James Wood

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 272 pp., $24

THOMAS BUNTING--the protagonist of "The Book Against God"--makes a practice of setting his face.

It was during the first or second year of our marriage, when I was working hardest on the Ph.D., that I contracted my habit of "setting" my face to resemble an appropriate emotional state--humble in post offices (because the staff are always so sullen), generous in shops, distracted at the university (to impress the students), arrogant in buses, confident with my parents, genial with Jane, sober with Max's parents, and so on.

Anyone who has read much of the last half-century of British fiction will perceive an echo of Kingsley Amis's Jim Dixon--the hero of "Lucky Jim"--with his extensive repertoire of faces: his "Martian invader face," his "shot-in-the-back face," and so on. Thomas Bunting resembles Jim Dixon in other ways as well: He drifts along the margins of an English university, possesses a remarkable collection of tics and peculiarities (in Bunting's case a mania for lying and a terror of insects), makes a mess of his relationships with women, and demonstrates a striking inability to get proper work done. In short, he's immediately recognizable as a comic type, familiar not only from "Lucky Jim" but also from more recent books--Nelson Humboldt in James Hynes's "The Lecturer's Tale," for instance.

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