4.15.2015

Ron Currie Jr. - 'God is Dead'

My friend Keith Meatto loaned me this book while I was visiting New York a couple months ago. We swap books as often as two people who live in different cities can. Additionally, Keith was my editor while Frontier Psychiatrist existed, and it's safe to say he has a pretty good idea of what I like to read. Case in point, Ron Currie Jr.'s debut book from 2007 God is Dead.

Spoiler alert, God dies in the beginning. The Almighty takes the body of a woman caught in war-torn Darfur, who is killed, eaten by dogs, and leaves the world wondering what to do now that he doesn't exist. Teens fulfill a suicide pact, ideological wars breakout, children are worshipped, people are accused of theism, kids text too much with people who never respond...all this and more.

Despite what the title may suggest, Nietzsche is never mentioned once throughout. In fact, the book doesn't necessarily aim to be philosophical at all. It doesn't really concern the matters of which religion was "right," or about atheism vs. agnosticism. It instead investigates the sunken corners of Currie's imagination of the world the way it actually would be were it to be found out there was no God. It's a world where people realized "God had created the universe and set it spinning, but it would continue chugging along despite the fact that he was no longer around to keep things tidy." The world doesn't end. CNN and Magic Bullet still exist in a post-God world. Hypocritical wars and angsty teens still exist. People are loathed, people are loved. Not much has really changed. But yet, things are irrevocably, if intangibly, different. 

The book works great as a series of loosely-related short stories, each one that works well on its own, but still exist within the same world. The flaw of a lot of short story collections is that they can be too much of a random smattering of works, that seem less like a cohesive album, moreso a collection of B-sides. Which isn't to say the B-sides can't be good, but that there's just something missing in that collection. Ironically, it is the death of God that brings together these stories together.

The book clocks in at less than two hundred pages, but I still read it in less than two days; it kept me gripped to the pages throughout. It was a welcome reprieve from the last two bloated novels I'd read which each seemed like a chore to finish (don't feel like writing about either of those, but in one book, everything 'stabbed,' and in the other, everything 'bloomed;' would have thought renowned authors could keep their verbiage in check).

God is Dead can equal parts make a reader cringe, laugh out loud, feel shock, grief, sadness, and hope. The book offers narrators in unique positions with various storytelling devices to keep each new story fresh and free from dragging. Highly recommended for those that can handle it. 

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