God Is Dead

Description

The electrifying, “cutting-edge” (USA Today) debut work of fiction from Ron Currie, author of the forethcoming novel The One-Eyed Man (March 2017)

Ron Currie’s gutsy, funny book is instantly gripping: If God takes human form and dies, what would become of life as we know it? Effortlessly combining outlandish humor with big questions about mortality, ethics, and human weakness, Ron Currie, Jr., holds a funhouse mirror to our present-day world. God has inhabited the mortal body of a young Dinka woman in the Sudan. When she is killed in the Darfur desert, he dies along with her, and word of his death soon begins to spread. Faced with the hard proof that there is no supreme being in charge, the world is irrevocably transformed, yet remains oddly recognizable.”Currie’s strength rests in his ability to focus on humanity’s conundrums on the smallest physical particles. The truth he presents is that the world has become adsurd; he is merely delivering a steady-cam view.”
–Los Angeles Times 

“[A] cavalierly abitious debut . . . with talking dogs, text message-happy teenagers, and end-of-day shenanigans. Like Kurt Vonnegut, [Currie] seems to understand that in the face of grim and grave concerns, humor is a more powerful salt than screed.”
–John Freeman, San Francisco Chronicle  

“Few authors would dare to depict the near rape and death of God amid a horrendous genocidal war, and fewer still could make it so bladder-threateningly hilarious. Although there’s genuine sadness throughout, God is Dead is very likely the most entertaining book ever written on the subject of deicide.”
–The Believer 

“God is Dead is a heady cocktail of ideas. Broad-stroke symbolism and delicately shaded realism are swished together with admirable aplomb. Currie’s skills are equal to just about any technical challenge. [His] stoic poignancy [is] reminiscent of Raymond Carver. . . . The naturalistic texture of Currie’s prose gives everything a scary ring of truth.”
–Michel Faber, The Guardian (London) 

“In Currie’s stories we come to know God as a feral dog and a genocide victim and Colin Powell as a foul-mouthed race warrior. It’s not clear which is a greater leap of faith but this brillaiant, absurdist fiction lets us embrace them both with a shiver of empthay. I for one would be a happier camper, as the sun sets on the American empire, if more of my own contrymen wrote like Ron Currie.”
–Lydia Millet, author of Oh Pure and Radiant Heart  

Ron Currie is the author of the forethcoming The One-Eyed Man and the novels Everything Matters!, Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles and the short story collection God Is Dead, which was the winner of the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award. Currie received the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His books have been translated into fifteen languages. He lives in Portland, Maine.

INTRODUCTION
In his first novel, Ron Currie takes Nietzsche’s audacious pronouncement, “God is dead,” and asks what would happen if God really were dead, literally and verifiably dead? How would that fact change the way humans see themselves and treat each other? The imaginative daring of such a premise is only the beginning of many surprises that fill the pages of God Is Dead.

God comes to earth disguised as a Dinka woman, implores Colin Powell to help find her brother, is killed in the Darfur desert, and then eaten by the wild dogs who follow in the wake of the genocidal Janjaweed. Such a scenario, at once absurd but not entirely implausible, invites readers to make an imaginative leap, to suspend their disbelief and enter into a world of strange possibilities and nightmare consequences. One group of young men, fearing starvation and madness, decide to kill themselves ritualistically; another group insists that God still exists; and parents with no god left to worship bestow a divine status on their children. One might assume that that the religious violence that is now erupting around the world would disappear if there were no god to justify the carnage, but in Currie’s novel, humans simply find other ideologies worth killing for.

The human capacity for foolishness, self-delusion, and violence are on full display in God Is Dead. Some people decide that the dogs who ate God’s body have become gods themselves and decide to worship them, a situation that any honest observer of human nature would find frighteningly plausible and that reveals Currie’s sly, satirical wit. “God” is, after all, “dog” spelled backwards.

Satire is, indeed, the dominant intention of God Is Dead. Like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Kurt Vonnegut’sSlaughterhouse Five, Currie’s novel takes the absurdities, idiocies, and cruelties that human beings commit and magnifies them just enough for us to see them in all their naked foolishness. This, Currie shows us, is the world we are creating. The book is not written out of contempt for humanity, however, but out of an unflinching vision that encompasses precisely those qualities—compassion, common sense, clear-seeing—that we are so busily engaged in destroying.

 

ABOUT RON CURRIE JR.

Ron Currie, Jr.’s prizewinning fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Sun, Other Voices, and Night Train. He has been short-listed for the Fish International Short Story Award and Swink magazine’s Emerging Writer Award. He lives in Waterville, Maine.

 

A CONVERSATION WITH RON CURRIE JR.

Q. Why did you choose an episodic structure for your novel?

A. It just made sense, given the freewheeling and eclectic topics I wanted to tackle. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, to tell both the story of a wild dog with divine omniscience, and the story of a regular guy who works in a paper plate factory, within the confines of a traditional novel. One just does not lead directly to another.

Q. What inspired you to make a living public figure, Colin Powell, into a fictional character in your novel?

A. It’s something that I don’t think can be neatly summed up. All sorts of reasons, starting with the fact that Powell did visit Darfur as secretary of state, which was convenient for the purposes of the book. Other reasons: my disappointment in the Bush administration in general and Powell in particular for doing next to nothing in Darfur (as evidenced by the fact that God Is Dead is still quite topical four years after I started writing it); the excitement and challenge of fictionalizing a real person; the fun of it; and the thrill of feeling like you’re getting away with something you probably shouldn’t.

Q. God Is Dead displays a keen awareness of the absurdities and cruelties of human beliefs and behavior. Do you consider it primarily a satirical work?

A. It’s funny you ask, because my aunt read the book recently and just today told me she didn’t think it was funny. So I’m guessing if you asked her this question, her answer would be no. But yes, there are obviously satirical elements, but I’m hesitant to call God Is Dead satire. This could just be my own inaccurate interpretation of what the word means, or what it means in a literary context, but to me satire has connotations of a certain intellectual coolness, a detachment from one’s subject. And I hope that regardless of what anyone thinks of the book they won’t accuse it of not caring. Because it’s all heart, baby. Seriously.

Q. You poke fun at Postmodernists in God Is Dead, but the novel itself could be classified as a work of postmodern fiction. What is your relation to postmodernism and, for that matter, evolutionary psychology?

A. I’ve been pretty heavily influenced by postmodern approaches to fiction—that is, what I think is the most commonly accepted definition of postmodernism in regard to fiction, which is work that breaks from convention in style, in content, in form, in language. The reason for this is fairly simple: I’m uniquely amused and excited by this sort of experimentation, so long as it’s not gratuitous. God Is Dead ended up being a mishmash of starkly postmodern forms, as in “Interview,” and more conventional forms, as in “The Bridge.” And this odd combination is indicative, I think, of my eclectic but spotty and certainly informal education. Writing-wise I am very much a product of contemporary literature, meaning I’ve read comparatively few books older than, say, fifty years, and even fewer older than one hundred. So guys like Barthelme and Vonnegut have had a lot more opportunity to mold me than, say, Joseph Conrad. I’ve spent a lot more time with Sherman Alexie and George Saunders than Fitzgerald or Hemingway. And so I guess I’m shaped by what I’ve exposed myself to.

Basically with the PoMo Anthropologists and the Evolutionary Psychologists I was trying to find the most ridiculous and unlikely ideologies for people to rally behind, en masse, in a Nazi Germany sort of way. And there is, to my understanding, a very real debate between academics in the postmodern anthropology and evolutionary psychology camps. Apparently it’s quite heated, though I don’t believe anyone’s lost any teeth over it. Tenure, maybe. But not teeth.

Q. It’s startling to read a work of contemporary fiction about an ongoing humanitarian crisis like the one in Darfur. What prompted you to write about the genocide there?

A. It started with my own introduction to the crisis there, which came in the form of an article in The Believer magazine about one of the famous Lost Boys of Sudan. It’s horrifying, of course, but the horror of the situation wasn’t what prompted me to write about it. As I read about the hundreds of thousands murdered and the millions displaced and starving, I thought about, years before, visiting Dachau and seeing the sculpture in front of the museum there, a wrought-iron piece depicting the bodies of concentration camp victims lying together in death, intertwined. I thought specifically of the inscription on the sculpture, the same words in half a dozen languages: NEVER AGAIN. And then I thought about Cambodia and Rwanda and now Sudan, and I got mad, because nothing pisses me off like hypocrisy and empty gestures, even though I myself am guilty of both. But that was when I was inspired to get to work. I find anger to be a great motivator.

Q. To what extent does the novel reflect your own views of religious and secular ideologies?

A. It’s pretty much a laundry list of complaints I have regarding theologies and secular ideologies. It could be considered a protest against groupthink of any kind. We’re stupid when we gather in groups. This is hardly news, and yet it bears repeating. We stop thinking for ourselves. We demonize those who don’t subscribe to our way of not-thinking. We believe fairy tales. We defer to the judgment of idiots with silver tongues. We approve of, vote for, and even engage directly in horrid behavior we would never otherwise consider.

We need to get the hell away from one another, put some space between ourselves and our neighbors, so we can breathe and use our heads. Yet here we are, gathering in the world’s urban centers in ever-increasing, ever more dense numbers. Of course, keep in mind these are the rants of a country boy who has an instinctive allergic reaction to large crowds.

Q. Many writers today go through MFA programs and aspire to teach in universities. Does that path interest you? Do you think MFA programs are a good way for young writers to learn their art?

A. Well I couldn’t say, because I haven’t been to one. I think, based on what I’ve read and heard, that MFA programs provide students with one thing of tremendous value, especially to an apprentice writer, and that’s two solid years to write uninterrupted. There is, of course, the super-tired debate about whether or not MFA programs are churning out cookie-cutter writers. My instinct is that that’s not true, that no matter what path you take you’ll either reach a point where you’re writing good, original, entertaining stuff, or you won’t. And that it has more to do with how much and how widely you read, and whether or not you arrange your life with writing as your first priority, than with whether or not you got into Iowa.

Q. What writers have been most influential for you? What young writers would you recommend to your readers?

A. Influences come from pretty much every creative discipline, from pop music to pottery (okay, maybe not pottery), so it’s tough and sort of unproductive to single out a handful.

I would recommend any book that readers won’t swap out for the TV remote after two pages. Not that I have anything against TV. I love TV.

Q. This is your first novel. Where do you see your work heading next?

A. It’s already headed there. My next novel—which, not surprisingly, is also about the end of the world—is nearly finished and should see the light of day sometime in the next couple years. This time, the end of the world comes in the form of a comet and the novel’s main character knows about the impending apocalypse thirty years in advance through somewhat inexplicable circumstances that may or may not be divine in nature.

 

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

What is most surprising about Currie’s depiction of God?
 

God Is Dead takes the form of separate but interconnected stories. What effect does Ron Currie create by structuring the novel in this way? How are the stories connected?
 

What ironies are involved in God taking the form of a Dinka woman, being killed by the Janjaweed, and then eaten by wild dogs? Why is God powerless, in Currie’s novel, to stop the slaughter in Darfur or to save her own life? What are the larger implications of this powerlessness?
 

Dostoevsky said that “If God is dead, everything is permissible.” How does the death of God affect people in the novel? How do they react? How do their lives change because of it?
 

Professor Oswalt says that “One of our great dilemmas . . . is how to strike a balance between our principles, as Postmodern Anthropologists, and our security.” What are the principles of the Postmodern Anthropologists? Why are those principles incompatible with maintaining their own security? Why are the PoMo Anthropologists at war with the Evolutionary Psychologists? What is Currie satirizing here?
 

In what ways does God Is Dead illuminate our current social, political, and religious milieu? In what ways can it be read as a kind of satirical fable or commentary on our time?
 

Rick says that “by the time they told us God was dead and all hell broke loose, it seemed like kind of a blessing to me. . . . I understood those guys who climb clock towers or walk into a McDonald’s with guns blazing. I felt more like them than the people who stand around after the rampages crying and asking why, why, why. Because I understood there is no why. There’s the impulse, and the act. But nothing else” [p. 49]. Why does Rick see God’s death as “a blessing”? Is he right in implying that without God there are only meaningless impulses and meaningless acts?
 

What are some of this novel’s more surprising features? In what ways—formally and thematically—does it differ from most contemporary fiction? What is the value of Currie’s breaking of convention?
 

How do the Biblical passages Currie places at the beginning of each chapter illuminate what follows? What is the effect of quoting the Bible in a novel about the death of God?
 

At the end of the novel, Arnold and Ty drive “through the bombs and the fire and the people in the streets who didn’t seem to notice that their world was being destroyed.” What is the significance of people not noticing their world is being destroyed, having been drugged into forgetting there is a war going on? Why would Currie end the novel this way?

US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.5400 × 5.0300 × 8.1500 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780143113485
ISBN-10	0143113488
Author	Ron Currie
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC029000, FIC060000
Subjects	sci fi, post apocalyptic, post apocalyptic fiction, sci-fi, literary fiction, shorts, magical realism, contemporary fiction, dystopian fiction, science fiction books, dystopian, religious books, horror books, satire, classic literature, short story collections, horror novels, FIC060000, sci fi books, short story collection, contemporary, religion, FIC029000, war, magic, horror, romance, supernatural, fantasy, romance books, Literature, literary, humor, science fiction, dystopia, stories, short stories, short story, fantasy books, speculative fiction