Absurdistan has received almost universal praise from critics. Elle described it as a "freakishly intelligent, verbally giddy, frequently flying ride." The Cleveland Plain Dealer called it "weighty...a riotous, often sad, but redemptive ride that is never weighed down by its big topics." Walter Kirn, who wrote about it for the New York Times, was beside himself with acclaim, calling Shteyngart "a giant on horseback" and beginning his review with random quotes from the novel.

But I've noticed that many critics have been relying more than usual on that trusted reviewer's tool, the comparison - desperate, it seems, to provide readers (and possibly themselves) with some point of reference for this bothersome book. Shteyngart has been likened to Vladimir Nabakov, Saul Bellow, John Kennedy Toole, Leonard Wibberly, and Woody Allen. Other reviewers have compared Misha Vainberg, the hero of Absurdistan, to Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov - the Russian Hamlet who is said to have answered "No" to the question "To be or not to be" - as well as to Ferdinand, the bull who preferred to smell flowers than to fight (originally a children's story, then a 1938 Oscar-winning Disney cartoon, and eventually, much later, a tattoo on the right arm of singer-songwriter Elliot Smith). And I'd like to add to these lists Christopher Buckley, Benjamin Kunkel, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Michael Moore, Finnish surf-rockers Laika and the Cosmonauts, and Fez from "That 70's Show." No kidding, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel called Absurdistan "a Monster Truck Rally of a satire, sort of Jonathan Swift does 'South Park' with help from Rabelais, Gogol, Kafka, the Marx Brothers, Evelyn Waugh and Joseph Heller." The thing is, I can see that.

Misha Vainberg is thirty years old, weighs well over 300 pounds, and is the son of the 1,238th-richest man in Russia. He describes himself as "an American impounded in a Russian's body." He wears vintage Puma track suits and in his spare time (which, like everything else, he has in abundance) Misha likes to freestyle rap. He graduated from Accidental College in the American Midwest with a degree in Multicultural Studies and has lived in New York City for eight years. After a visit to St. Petersburg, however, Misha is forbidden to fly back to the United States because his father, who used to only "dabble in criminal oligarchy," is now a full-fledged gangster and has recently assassinated an influential Oklahoma businessman.

Misha travels to the country of Absurdistan to buy Belgian citizenship and a chance to win back his wayward "multicultural" girlfriend, Rouenna, who lives in the Bronx and describes herself as a onetime Catholic, now Methodist, half Puerto Rican, half German, half Mexican, and half Irish, but she was "raised mostly Dominican." But things go from bad to worse in Absurdisvani. Misha is caught in the middle of the country's two largest ethnic groups, the Sevo and the Svani, and a civil war ostensibly over which direction Christ's footrest should tilt on the Orthodox cross. But Misha discovers that the internal conflict is actually a wag-the-dog genocide being orchestrated from the top floor of the Hyatt hotel by local warlords, U.S. officials, American Express, Century21, and a multinational corporation the Absurdis call "Golly Burton."

Absurdistan is the most wicked of satires. The author wields a sharp blade and slashes indiscriminately. No one in the room is safe. He lays open communism and capitalism, Russia and the United States, foreign policy, the media, and religion. Dick Cheney and Vladimir Putin are minor characters. He laces the book with enough "factual" detail that I spent a good amount of time flipping through my encyclopedia looking, for example, for the inspiration for the fictional Absurdistan - the "Norway of the Caspian," near Iran, with a country to the north that has a green flag bearing the Muslim crescent. (I never could tell.) The book ends on the morning of September 11, 2001, for no other reason (as far as I can tell) than to have it end on September 11, 2001. Shteyngart even targets himself. Rouenna has an affair with Misha's old Accidental nemesis, a Russian expatriate named Jerry Shteynfarb, whose first novel is a semi-pornographic version of The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Shteyngart's much-lauded entree.

Shteyngart even comes close to satirizing the satire. Absurdistan seems solid at first; under a microscope, however, its building blocks are less substantial, like quarks, or like puffs of matter that exist in two places at the same time and maybe don't exist at all. The jokes in the book are good but the biggest joke is on us all.

Maybe.

I went to the Garden of Love
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gown, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joy and desires.

-William Blake
(18th century English Poet)

Traveling along the English countryside, I find a church, dilapidated and seemingly forgotten, like the weather worn tombstones in its surrounding cemetery. As the weed-choked graveyard is an image of death and neglect, the church too appears an old, unvisited grave. Only a forced act of imagination will envision that like the bones buried underground, the church too has once been alive. Thus when I read Blake's "Garden of Love," my landscape observed becomes a stark metaphor of the poet's words. I view the ruins as Blake's chapel centuries later, when only rubble remains of faith worn down by oppression and violence. Yet, the country church provides an image not only for an 18th century poem, but also for a certain brand of religion so prevalent in today's politics and media. There is a Christianity being offered today that fits all too well with the religion Blake laments- and perhaps the ruin so aptly prophesied.

Consider the details unveiled by the poet. A visitor returns to the "the green" and is shocked to find a church. The man-made structure seems to wound the land as its accompanying graveyard overtakes a childhood playground. The metaphor is hardly subtle, for to the Romantic poets, nature is an expression of glory and children are conduits of divinity. The church harms both, disregarding how its presence violates the land and the original inhabitants.

Worse yet, the chapel is gated and locked with a threatening display of the written word "Thou shall not." It is both imposing and opposing. It offers no receptivity; just to pass the threshold one must encounter all that it keeps out. We know not what it is about, only what it condemns, and thus the words become agents of wounding. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, words hold a creative, life imparting power. God spoke the earth into existence with his Word. Life, it is written, is not sustained on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Blake's poetry portrays the irony: a tradition with an innate design to value words as a life-giving source, will instead fashion words to swords. The very phrase "Thou shall not" serves not to guard life but to destroy.

The poem continues with the stark image of tombstones replacing flowers. There is death where life should be. Man carved structure where nature should spring. And priests, in draped black, walk their rounds. The path is routine, lifeless, presumed- and violent. Those traversing it bind desire with thorny briars, committing violence both physical and soul-felt. In the bloody image is a reminder of the crown of thorns woven by the religious hand. (Lest we forget, that Jesus himself suffered under the very kind of institution Blake condemns.)

The poet has made his diagnosis: the chapel suffers from stifling legalism, shut gates, and a severing of the appreciation of nature as an expression of God. If the visitor's remembered garden is an image of life seeded by play and desire, then the chapel represents life bound under carefully articulated control, where the only movement allowed is the traversing of well-worn paths. The church, like any institution, is most comfortable "walking its rounds," claiming familiar authority, and preaching party lines. Yet, the Christ of Scripture is not predictable, but unabashed in smashing religious routine.

I look again at the country church before me, noticing the very route to the front door is hardly detectible, so overgrown with weeds. And I see Blake's chapel like a tombstone. Where, I ask, might I see faith enlivened?

Past the church, I continue along the winding, country road and make it to town square. Still thinking of Blake's words, I weave my way amongst the crowds. The market buzzes with the masses, and I notice a little boy at the flower stand making a bouquet from daisies. "Mum," the boy asks, "When dad gets to heaven, will he get to eat bread and fish with Jesus?" The mother kneels down beside her son. "Yes, dear," she answers, tenderly intent on the selection of flowers for the dying man.

The market is loud and bussling, and the moment is striking and still. In his grief, the small boy speaks of a relationship with Christ that pierces me as profound and intimate. For bread and fish is resurrection theology: the feast Jesus offers on Easter morning. The childlike faith presses into hope- that life can yet be rebirthed, that resurrection is a fundamental reality. The heartache in the marketplace becomes for me a startling parable.

If my reading of Blake- and my metaphor of country ruins- have propelled me down a path of judgment on an institution, my encounter with a small child outside church walls invites me again to resurrection. If new life is the crux of the Gospel, can we dare hope for the resurrection of the church itself? I speak primarily of the church of the first world, whose ears have grown deaf with power and perhaps can no longer hear the cries of those who have been labeled, judged, and outcast. Furthermore, would we learn to see how we are prone to petrify the dominant discourse, and in the process, silence the richness of voices that will not wrap themselves around our dogma? I fear Jesus reached out to outcasts while the church is primarily in the business of making them. Like the doors of Blake's chapel, it is literally shutting out life. Here is where I grieve, and here is where I want to wager hope that there is yet another way.

If there is rebirth- a new vitality of faith and love- might it begin with confession of our injustice. May we recognize the violence in which we have been complicit. Blake's image of the church is sanguinary; briars are left dripping with blood. Colonialism, nationalistic pride, wanton use of resources- violence has been endemic in this legacy. It is a violence reaching into both physical and spiritual realms.

New life in the Gospel's story so often is born in confession- a kind of truth telling that calls us to recognize how we have wounded and to know our own wounds. Hope will stand on the threshold of the church when it is willing to speak honestly of its brokenness- to own its inquisitions and name how it has pandered to power. And thankfully, there is more to this story, for we rejoice in the testimony of those though whom we glimpse redemption: a single woman I know caring for children in South Africa, artists in my local church using their gifts to reflect glory, a little boy trusting that his dad will dine with a King. If we will ask to see and take part in healing, justice, the kingdom of God, we will find much to rejoice in. Confessing and rejoicing: Blake's church and ours will need both for resurrection.

[After] death amends may no man make,
For then mercy and pity do him forsake.
If his reckoning be not clear when he do come,
God will say - ite maledicti in ignem aeternum.

Philip Roth's new novel, also entitled Everyman, is itself a powerful reckoning, an extended meditation on brokenness and mortality, on the body and the soil and lost opportunities. Even if it deserves to be placed among Roth's "minor" works - and it does, and not just because of the book's slight 182 pages and oversized font - Everyman is still the product of a world class novelist at the height of his literary powers. Gone are the clunky allegories of the medieval play, as well as its didacticism and its Catholicism. Roth writes instead with a subtle vitality that runs counter to the themes of the book and belies the author's own advanced years (he is well into his eighth decade).

The novel's protagonist, whose name we never learn, grows up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where his father is a jeweler. The boy develops an early interest in painting. After serving in the Navy just after the Korean War, the man goes into advertising, eventually rising to the position of artistic director. He marries three times, has a few affairs, and sires three children - only one of whom will have anything to do with him in later years.

These elements - childhood, work, marriage, sex, and family - are the landscapes of the modern novelist. But not here. For Roth's everyman, death and illness are the milestones of life. Nearly every passage deals with the incremental or final collapse of the human body. "Old age isn't a battle," the man concludes. "Old age is a massacre."

And rather than turning to thoughts of the afterlife, the man's perspective remains stubbornly earth-bound. He grew up Jewish but "stopped taking Judaism seriously at thirteen - the Sunday after the Saturday of his bar mitzvah."

"No hocus-pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us. If [the man] could be said to have located a philosophical niche for himself that was it - he'd come up on it early and intuitively, and however elemental, that was the whole of it. Should he ever write an autobiography, he'd call it The Life and Death of a Male Body."

At times Everyman reads like a medical history form. The hospitalizations are dealt with in detail - tonsils removed, hernia, burst appendix, bypass, angioplasties, endarterectomy, stents, a permanent defibrillator, and much more - while twenty-two years of relatively good health are dispensed with in a paragraph.

Yet the book also reads like a sort of ghost story. The "deliberate independence" cultivated by the man for so long comes back to haunt him. Near the end of the book, the man has a harrowing dream in which he is calling out for the "cast of kin on whom he could not gain no matter how hard he pursued them."

"Momma, Poppa, Howie, Phoebe, Nancy, Randy, Lonny - if only I'd known how to do it! Can't you hear me? I'm leaving! It's over and I'm leaving you all behind!" And those vanishing as fast from him as he from them turned just their heads to cry out in turn, and all too meaningfully, "Too late!"

In Roth's thriller, the torment lies in the deeds that are not done - and past a certain unpredictable but inevitable point, can never be done.

Really, though, when you think about it, it's kind of dumb.

This is not to say that Douglas Coupland is not a talented writer. Even his lesser novels pull the reader in. In Eleanor Rigby, the main character is an overweight and anonymous woman who's personality is drawn with considerable skill. Life After God is my favorite Coupland novel to date primarily because he limits himself to his writing: no clever gimmicks or otherworldly plotlines.

And that is not to say that gimmickry is a bad thing. When done correctly, a print trick or story twist can be remarkably effective. For example: the marginal notes in Coupland's signature Generation X and use of the copyright page as a story-telling tool in Dave Eggers' Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

jPod, Coupland's latest novel, is filled with these tricks, and they come off contrived and a bit obnoxious. 22 pages are devoted to the number pi. Advertisements are laid out in large font on entire pages. The worst trick is the introduction of Coupland as a character in his own novel. The first line of the book is innocent enough, "'Oh God. I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel'", but the act wears thin with each reference.

Coupland's subject matter is ambitious. jPod is his first novel to step away from Generation X and into Y. I sit precariously on the X/Y border and enjoy any discussion of the defining traits of my generation, especially from a writer who practically defined his.

The focus is not as broad as it sounds, however. Coupland's Y-ers, like the X-ers in Microserfs, are computer geeks (in this case, video game programmers) stuck in a purgatorial cubicle colony nicknamed jPod. Each of the pod inhabitants, as one of them discovers, exhibit symptoms of autism. Maybe it's because of this, but the jPodders seem suspiciously similar to Generation X.

The same day that I bought the book, I caught a story on NPR about Generation Y-ers entering the job market. You can listen to the piece here. Some of the concepts that define the newest generation range from a higher focus on family and community to the desire to "work to live" as opposed to "live to work" (as a member of Generation Y, I might more accurately define these traits as laziness and a sense of entitlement).

Coupland's characters work Industrial Revolution-era hours, but their community is fairly broad, primarily focused on the jPod team and colorful array of outsiders. It's within this community that Coupland scratches the surface of his most interesting topic.

Story-wise, Coupland's characters inhabit a moral ambiguity: the narrator's mother is unfailingly gracious, but she also keeps genetic charts for her marijuana plot, kills a member of a biker gang, and leaves her husband to experiment with lesbianism. Their boss becomes a heroin addict after being kidnapped and sent to China by another primary character, a sociopathic Asian mob boss considered a close friend of the jPodders.

None of these transgressions or personalities receive an inch of judgment, even in the subtext. On the contrary, each of the characters above is portrayed as lovable and sweetly eccentric. It's in this gray morality that Coupland comes closest to hitting the nail on the head. Perhaps it was the attempt by right-wing pundits to discredit Bill Clinton's marital infidelities, or perhaps it's reaction to Conservative Christian lobbyists/pastors striving to turn Judeo-Christian ethics into law (the characters pay no interest to politics or bigger issues), but the Generation Y-ers Coupland paints are almost completely amoral.

Coupland doesn't denounce or support this perception. His character, in fact, serves to give the jPodders a worthy focus for their talent in the end. The discussion here is interesting, and will receive more commentary in the future as Generation Y-ers gain further cultural prominence. There appears to be a trade-off between morality and judgment that is difficult to toe (Paul's letters to the Corinthians would be an example).

I have to admit that while jPod didn't offer the depth of some of Douglas Coupland's earlier work or of other books I've recently picked up, it was an enjoyable read. It has to be difficult to maintain his legendary pop culture status, but I think Coupland would be better served to rely on his skilled prose rather than blockbuster schemes.

When people learn I'm going for a degree in English, they often ask about my favorite authors. Interestingly, they always assume my favorite authors will be dead guys (or gals), and in fact they are basically justified. I do have a short list of contemporary authors worth reading (J.M. Coetze, David James Duncan, Solzhenitsyn, etc.) but it is a -short list (and Solzhenitsyn will probably die soon). The fact is I've not been very impressed with a lot of what is being written nowadays; it takes a lot of time and effort to find something that gets beyond an interesting gimmick. Instead, as with movies (which usually have a price tag beyond my meager grad-student means), I usually let the reviewers do some of that work for me.

So I was excited to have a chance to read Marilynne Robinson's second novel, because I have never read or heard anything negative about it. Having read it, I think it may just be the case that there is nothing negative to say about it. Or, just as likely, everyone who has read it would feel uncomfortable, even down-right mean, were they to try to make a criticism of it. That's because this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is one of the most ambitiously modest works you are likely to ever read. And yet, when you sit down to read it, it feels like the most important thing you could be doing in that moment.

My paperback edition is covered front and back with laudatory, sometimes hyperbolic blurbs crowning Robinson with all the literary laurels the critics can muster, which certainly creates a sense of expectation in the newcomer. By the book's end I realized all the praises were true, but not necessarily for the reasons I had imagined. There is nothing particularly epic, or tragic, or dramatic, or any of those genre-words we use to denote the portrayal of grand themes and grand emotions--but that is not to say the book isn't grand. In fact, Robinson's achievement is precisely to render the ordinary in its spiritual grandeur.

"Spiritual reality," I almost said, for the overwhelming feeling of reading the book is that the world of Gilead, Iowa is so much more real than our own world--and yet, in a way, it also makes our world seem very, very real. The novel is written from the perspective of John Ames, a third-generation preacher in this small, rural community. Ames entered his second marriage late in life, and upon learning of a heart condition he begins his memoir as a kind of love-letter to his young son, pouring into it the wisdom and stories of his experience that he will not live to tell himself. Ames writes patiently and with a disarming honesty about his father and grandfather, about his first wife and daughter, and about his own triumphs and failures as a minister, a husband, and a father. Yet in Ames we do not see a man passing down knowledge of life's answers, but one still asking the questions, and sharing what he can about how to seek the answers.

The how of seeking answers is what distinguishes these stories from any other stories. A lifetime of living with and in the Scriptures infuses Ames's perception of reality with a clarity that transcends the language used to express it. Thus the series of largely mundane events in the novel each acquire a numinous quality, are each transfigured by faith even before Ames himself fully comprehends them. Indeed, comprehension is not the point, and this is why the stories in Gilead do not quite amount to one overarching, coherent narrative. Rather, Ames models for us the process of reflection by which we examine our experience to discover the sanctity within it--or, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, "the dearest freshness deep down things." Life becomes a series of opportunities to connect with others or to keep them at a distance, and the consequences may never be known.

The inside cover of my paperback contains a quote from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that says "Readers with no interest in religion will find pleasure in this hymn to existence," and I hope they will. But I also hope they resist the secular urge to reduce the specifically Christian spirituality within it to a general, nameless "spirituality." If a Muslim or Jew or Hindu were to sit down and write with the same method and intent as did Robinson, they might very well create a book as beautiful and luminous as Gilead, but I daresay we would find the issues and concerns elaborated with significant differences--and different significances. The Fall lurks quietly beneath everything in the novel as the principle of division, that human perversity which even comes between people who desire to know one another better. And the Incarnation, God's appearance in the flesh of this earthly existence, is what makes it possible for Ames to look back upon life and love it so dearly.

Still, I would like to find such a series of books, for if they were as real as Gilead, they would no doubt go far toward creating understanding of the beauty and virtue at the heart of the human religious impulse, while making it clear that the content of one's faith conditions one's perceptions of the world. To see the world as transfigured requires that some power inheres within it that makes it so--as opposed to some power within us that confers beauty upon things--and any such power, did it exist, would by its very existence have a claim on the one who perceived it--this is what Ames means when he asks "who could have the courage to see it?"

Gilead is such a novel with courage to look, and to see, and to name that transfigured reality, such a fiction as proves faith real because it could not be written without it. Gilead reads like a devotional, and it should therefore be read slowly, in a quiet hour, and with a patient attention to its earnest desire to communicate something true. Ames reflects that it seems "sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance--for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light." What God does for Creation, Robinson does for American fiction, elevating story to a hot, vibrant pitch such that, for a moment, the world is wonderful, novels have power, and hope is possible.

My most recent reading project was The Brothers K by David James Duncan, a book that has long been treading water in the dregs of my reading list. Despite almost universal love for this novel from anyone I know who has ever read it, I must mention that I have mixed feelings.

The closest metaphor I can think of to describe The Brothers K is that of a frog in a pot of water, unaware that the water is warming. The novel starts with an almost idyllic setting: Camas, Washington in 1956, a family with four young boys, two baby twin girls, a baseball playing father and a slightly eccentric, Adventist mother. The father, Hugh Chance, a promising Triple A pitcher who just keeps missing his chance at the Bigs, has recently suffered an accident at the Camas paper mill, and his thumb is crushed, his career ostensibly over. Duncan shows a glimpse of each character with a minimalist's pen, each boy an early look at who he will become. The family sits, watching the Ed Sullivan Show in the opening frames, and as the mother, Laura, hands Hugh a peeled orange, Duncan's prose, written through the eyes of the youngest son, Kincaid, comes to life as Hugh and the rest of the family remember sadly the damaged appendage:

"Yet as we watch him now, our own faces falling, Papa is somehow able to maintain his poker face. And then his off hand, the good one, starts flickering faster than my eye can follow and orange slices go flying like Russian dancers. Everett, Irwin and Peter all catch their slices, and Peter has to whip his hands out of his sleeves to do it; my slices bounces right off my open mouth, but Papa's everywhere hand somehow darts out, catches it, stuffs it back in..."

The portrait is of a family that loves each other intensely, held together by their gifted father, who is admired as a god by his sons. As the boys grow older, though, as any family will, their personalities develop, and the water starts to bubble.

There isn't much to complain about here...the characters are slightly caricatured (Peter, the second son, one of the top prep baseball players in the United States, eschews a full-ride baseball scholarship to become a Harvard-educated mystic who studies in India, for instance), but they react realistically with each other. Each boy is, in a sense, a segment of society during the tumultuous 60's: the passive narrator, Kincaid; the dumb-but-Christ-like Irwin; the arrogant but brilliant-minded Everett; the spiritual one, Peter. Their individual minds bounce off powerful themes like Vietnam and their mother's fanatic Christianity, and the reactions seem to fit well and to make comment on how all of America reacted during those times. I was pulled in by these characters, and definitely immersed in the world that Duncan spins.

But my foremost complaint of the book is the way it leaps between darkness and goofy, even cloying, relational tension. My initial feeling is that Duncan overplays the redemptive themes of the book. I hate to say that, because redemptive themes also make the book great, but I found myself lingering in the book's darker moments, thinking that those times seemed more real considering the personalities involved. Some of the darker moments are outright painful (one friend of mine, while reading, threw the book across the room and didn't pick it up again for six months), but I can't imagine this novel without them.

Overall, The Brothers K is buoyant in the face of sadness, and similar to A Prayer for Owen Meaney in its use of the individual characters to explain the massive themes of the 60's and 70's. From a personal standpoint, my mom and dad were being raised around the same time, a few miles South and West in Portland, and the pictures of the Columbia River, The University of Oregon Medical School (now OHSU), even the sweet stink of the paper mill in Camas, are glimpses back to my own family. The Brothers K is ambitious, loving and powerful, with a few flaws that, from the breathless recommendations of others, only bothered me.

David James Duncan, The Brothers K: B+

McLaren is unequivocal: his intended audience is the "spiritual, but not religious." For one who disdains advertising, he understood his market well when he chose the title, and it sounds like something Elaine Pagels would write. The title will give the book facetime with that audience. Moreover, it actually corresponds to McLaren's argument regarding Jesus' method of intrigue for conveying his secret message.

In this book, McLaren's argument is divided into 3 sections. First, he examines the culture of Jesus' day, its religious overtones, and competing kingdoms of power. Then, he seeks to tease out the meaning Jesus' message had in that cultural context. Finally, he attempts to translate that meaning for current culture. So, basically we could use a Red Cross metaphor: McLaren plunges his syringe into the vein of Jesus' culture, withdraws the life-giving blood of Jesus' words, and transfuses it into the vein of a new culture in need.

I appreciated his new, fresh method for understanding Jesus' intentional use parables to develop conversations that require his hearers to humbly invest and engage with his ideas. McLaren makes a sensible case for Jesus' method as one of engagement, intrigue, and provocation and provides a basis for Jesus' indirectness. This is his strongest argument in the book, offering a new interpretive paradigm, something McLaren has a knack for.

McLaren also helps us catch a glimpse of Jesus in his own cultural context. He contrasts Jesus with other Jewish religious groups to show how Jesus is unique; then he uses the Jewish roles of prophet and priest to further flesh out Jesus' activities. However, these discussions remain brief, which is appropriate for the "spiritual, but not religious" but incomplete for better acquainted followers of Jesus.

McLaren's approach to The Secret Message is as a formal argument, a far cry from his postmodern methods. In an endnote from chapter 5, he recommends reading A Generous Orthodoxy or Finding Faith for a "more personal or confessional" style or writing. Yet, in this book McLaren's seems to try to retain a similar tone and method. This synthesis proves to do more harm than good for McLaren's argument: instead of presenting his definitions and assumptions early on like most arguments, McLaren tries to shape this book a journey to a conclusion, ultimately undermining his thesis.

I think McLaren's intent is to be a travel guide. He wants readers to journey with him to an understanding of what the Kingdom of God is. Yet the format of the book is that of a structured argument, not a meandering journey. He's forcing a logical argument into a poetic process. It simply doesn't work; square peg, round hole. It also means we have no working definition of the Kingdom of God until the last chapter.

This is the ongoing frustration while reading The Secret Message. Perhaps McLaren was imitating Jesus' indirect approach by using evocative language rather than literal language: like using a Red Cross metaphor instead of technical definitions. This would seem to vindicate McLaren's ambiguity. Except, he does finally offer a literal definition: in the last chapter, McLaren writes: "this world will become the Kingdom of God."

If McLaren had these views when he began the book, why didn't he provide his readers with this thesis earlier in the book? We need to know the destination in order for the journey to make sense; we needed a map to understand the progress we were making.

Had he begun by giving the reader the big map, the stops along the way would have been more meaningful. Perhaps a second read would be more beneficial having that definition. There was no resolution until the last chapter.

Overall, the early chapters of The Secret Message of Jesus are the best; McLaren writes for his target readers. Over time however, his thoughts and concepts become more vague and the book loses momentum. The writing veers from its target. As an argument, the book kindles curiosity about the Kingdom but only because McLaren's own definition of the Kingdom is so absent while his emphasis on the Kingdom's importance is so present. As a poem, the book is stifled by the argument. And like a poem, to begin to grasp the Kingdom of God as the secret message of Jesus, a second read is necessary.

Dwight's biggest choice, essentially one of purpose, is whether to pursue his "own little version" of the American dream -

The Abulinixes might or might not be duds, but in any case I had arrived at a major life decision, which was that I really didn't give any particular f*** what happened to me once I got back to America, as long as I did make it back and got some new job there as unsatisfying as the last one...As long as I could sit in a comfortable chair, in a private home fumigated against spiders, watching some quality programming on TV, as long as I had some non-Ecuadorian food and upholstered furniture, fresh laundry and regular access to a hot shower, if I had shaving cream and razors, and shampoo and conditioner in a jungle-free environment - that was going to be fine with me. And since it wouldn't be fine with my kids, who would feel ashamed of dad's lifestyle, I wouldn't have them. Little f***ers.

- or live with empathy and recognize and serve global justice.

The choice is not for Dwight alone. He seems to be making a decision on behalf of an entire generation, one that must confront the aftermath of the September 11th attacks (which he witnessed from six blocks away with Ecstasy-induced if short-lived optimism); a "consumer society"; boomer parents who just won't die; and the end of the Cold War with its threats of nuclear annihilation. "We could never imagine growing up because the future could always be cancelled at any time," Dwight's sister, Alice, says while leading him through psychoanalysis. "So beyond a certain narrow time frame our desires ran into a kind of horizon and had to stop. There was no such thing as the long term."

Despite its length (just 241 pages) and colloquial tone, Indecision is bold in its scope and style. Kunkel alternates between a sort of droll Socratic dialogue and a lucid (recreational drug use notwithstanding) interior monologue. He also moves deftly between continents and across time. The book is sometimes tender, often hilarious, and always smart. Its characters are intelligent and mostly kind - Kunkel is generous, there are no human antagonists here - and they are comfortable with their contradictions. Kunkel has chosen an equally ambitious theme: what Dwight's favorite philosopher (the fictional Otto Knittel) might have called the existential paralysis of an aging Generation X. To fulfill the promise of his brainy prose and to bring the tale to a satisfying and credible conclusion, Kunkel has to remain watchful, nimble. And he almost makes it.

It's not very often that a reader can pinpoint the exact spot where the wheels come off a story. Even more rare is for the wheels to come off so spectacularly, so very close to the end. Here, that moment is on page 212, the final word of the fourth paragraph, in an epiphanic moment so contrived that it diminishes the effect of an otherwise provocative and enjoyable work. In the last 30 pages, Indecision devolves neatly and finally from novel into social manifesto and, sadly, it fails at both.

Her second book, Animals in Translation, is a fascinating look at how animals and autistic people think. It took years for Grandin to realize she thought differently than most people, that her brain worked in pictures, not words, and it took a few more years for her to discover animal minds work in much the same way. The book is a window into a thought process that is alien to most of us, and it is written simply, with plentiful anecdotes and humorous illustration.

It's a difficult undertaking to be sure, but the bridge between the Grandin and common people like you or I is likely Grandin's co-writer, Catherine Johnson. Johnson has two boys who are autistic, and that experience allowed her to connect Grandin's thought process and concepts with non-autistic thinkers.

The voice, though, is all Grandin's, and her brilliant mind and sense of humor shine through. Autistic people are sometimes considered child-like and innocent, Grandin writes, and the joy she takes in her work and in animals is a testament to that joy. The reader can almost hear her giggle as she relays stories of the sexual perversity of pigs and the rough tongues of cows curiously licking her.

The book falls short at times, though. Grandin is no doubt sincerely intelligent, but the strength of the book is in explaining the concept of thinking visually, and there are times when Grandin strays from her point.

An example of her strengths comes as she describes a friend's dog that would root through his garbage. Her friend figured that the dog was feeling shame because when its owner returned home and garbage was strewn across the room, the dog would cower in a corner. As an experiment, the dog's owner took the dog out of the room and put garbage on the floor himself. When the dog returned to the room, it cowered in a corner again. For the dog, the image of garbage on the floor when his master was present was bad, but the concept of rooting through the garbage in the first place was neutral.

But much of the book also focuses on animal behavior, and the lines blur a bit at that point. Since most of Grandin's experience is with livestock, some of her canine analysis comes off as conjecture (in Grandin's defense, she always informs the reader that she is assuming). In one case, for instance, she disagrees with the renown Monks of New Skete, who have been training dogs for generations, and it is hard to see how she is more qualified than they are to explain dog behavior. Many of the stories she relays of determining dog behavior are from case studies of dogs that are poorly behaved.

I am biased, though. Grandin is particularly critical of Staffordshire Terriers (pit bulls) and Rottweilers. Since I own an AmStaff (okay...pit bull), I am apt to unfairly defensive over some of the things she writes about those breeds, but she definitely provides valid insight.

All in all, Animals in Translation is a stunning explanation of the minds of both animals and autistic people. More and more children are being diagnosed with autism, and many folks within the medical community believe that autism has always been present, but that doctors are becoming better at recognizing its symptoms.

The impact of autism also provokes thought within a faith context, and it would've been interesting to hear Grandin's take on belief in a higher, unseen power or how people with autistic traits would view God. Since the spectrum of autism is wide, ranging from autistic savants (think the Tom Cruise/Dustin Hoffman film Rain Man) to people with mild autistic symptoms, the impact of undiagnosed autism on politics and religion could be a book in and of itself.

For other great reading on the topic of autism, check out Mark Haddon's brilliant novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Nick Hornby, author of About a Boy and High Fidelity, has a son who is autistic. He edited an excellent collection of short stories from some of today's top writers entitled Speaking with Angels. All of the proceeds from that book go toward research for autism.

For more information on autism, click here, and for more information on Temple Grandin, visit grandin.com.

The book starts by immediately hurling the reader into the seemingly mundane lives of Alfred and Enid Lambert, an elderly couple living the midwestern small town of St. Jude. In poignant and sometimes excruciating detail, author Jonathan Franzen describes not simply the activities performed by the aging couple, but the nuances of every emotive tendency. As you read this now, you may not feel as though you are interested in the exclusive insight into the lives of strangers that Franzen provides in The Corrections, but I assure you that even the smallest details (including but not limited to the names of family friends, hallucinations/dreams, erotic lesbian encounters, pictures painted on plates with undesirable rutabaga at supper time by a disillusioned young boy, et cetera) are entirely engrossing. Franzen then, methodically and meticulously, leads the reader through the lives of each of Alfred and Enid's three children, finally culminating the final Christmas they will all spend together in St. Jude at their mother's request. The final gathering of the family proves to be an underwhelming encounter between the five individuals, leaving the reader as frustrated as the characters seem to be when the exchange ends.

The brief segments of plot are few and far between amidst the vast quantities of background covered in the novel, causing certain sections to feel tedious and difficult. This phenomenon proves to be confusing because when The Corrections is over, it still feels as though it needed more length. In retrospect, the detail involved in the construction of the story seems sufficient, but the ending has an incomplete aura that can be either frustrating or refreshing depending on the reader. One of The Corrections' greatest accomplishments is its ability to establish itself as a book with all of the draw of one of the great literary classics, only with subject matter that is, at its essence, ordinary and realistic. Ultimately, Franzen proves himself as a storyteller and novelist in this immensely interesting novel. It will most certainly solidify in the minds of readers for a long period of time.

File Under: Corrections

Then, about 61 pages in depending on your particular copy of the novel, the old man begins to tell his story: an epic story of love, a world war, paintings and beauty and the sunlight on Roman architecture.

There are plenty of books decrying the horrors of war with black humor and wit. There are plenty of novels that depict beauty in prose, and there are plenty of books packed with exhilarating action. I've never read a book that combines all three as brilliantly as A Soldier of a Great War.

Before I touch on the actual story, I thought it would be best to list Mark Helprin's accolades as a writer. This first paragraph has a few lines culled from Helprin's website biography:

"Born in 1947, Mark Helprin was raised on the Hudson and in the British West Indies. After receiving degrees from Harvard College and Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, he did postgraduate work at the University of Oxford, Princeton, and Columbia. He has served in the British Merchant Navy, the Israeli infantry, and the Israeli Air Force."

In other words, Mark Helprin is a badass.

Alessandro Giuliani, the old man, was once a professor of aesthetics in Rome before World War I intervenes. Before the war, he stands against the machinations bringing Europe to the edge of disaster, but as everyone he knows and loves is sucked into the war with Austria Giuliani is forced to the front. His heroic service and gifts as a soldier take him from Sicily to the Alps to Hungarian Plains.

War novels can be as obnoxious and plentiful as paparazzi, and it is in prose that Helprin distinguishes himself. Whether describing the Alps at night or Italian farmers scorching their fields toward the Mediterranean coast, Helprin makes Giuliani's love for beauty more than believable. Giuliani is a renaissance man, frequently remembering Giorgione's painting The Tempest (pictured above) when his life seems at its darkest points.

Personally, I'm not a fan of flowery prose. I tend to prefer simplicity and the creative leaps that the reader makes on his or her own based on the writer's frame of reference. Mark Helprin, however, describes beauty and brutality beyond what I could imagine. Here is a brief passage describing a storm while Giuliani and his friend Rafi are mountain climbing:

"When their vision returned, they saw dark clouds rising into the same sort of obliging curves in the pine trees on the ledges. The high front rushed west and made a wonderful, terrifying, obedient dip right above the two climbers as it crested and abandoned the spire, like a snake that takes a wall."

There's plenty more where that came from. Every page drips of majestic storytelling, action and beauty. At around 800 pages, A Soldier of a Great War can take a while to get through, but few novels in my short life have been as engrossing as this one.

Filed Under: Better Action Heroes Than James Bond

This term, I found a class strictly devoted to the work of Faulkner and had to take the plunge. I have since been in a muddle trying to pull apart his mile-long sentences and figuring out how they work, not to mention being stuck with the chemical memory of his many unforgettable characters. The ones that have left the deepest impression on me were the Bundren family, introduced to me in the novel As I Lay Dying.

It may seem like an overused concept these days but I'm sure, in 1932, there weren't many books available on the market where each chapter was devoted to the point of view and inner dialogue of a different character. We get the fairly simple plot (the matriarch of the family passes away and the family both has to deal with the loss and take her coffin 40 miles to bury it in the family plot) told in crystalline detail and gettin into the head of each major character in the book, even the mind of the dead mother. The effect is challenging, sometimes aggravating and oft times hard to deal with, but that is not too far afield from what it would be like to be an actual member of that clan.

What is especially striking about this book is its insight into the concept of a family and what that meant in the post-Civil War era in the American South. It seems to me that there aren't many books or works of art being made today that deal with families like this one. The Bundren family, for all their faults and grievances, stayed together. It has the equally disturbing effect of making the bitterness and deceits that were enacted by various family members that much more distressing, yet it also makes palpable the necessity for seeing why the family, especially the headstrong father, want to get their mother to the family plot no matter what tries to stop them.

I didn't realize the impact of this passage until I was watching the Carl Theodor Dreyer film Ordet and looked at the dynamic of a family living on a farm in Denmark. The father, his three sons, his daughter-in-law, and grandchildren were all still living together, scraping a living together off the land. This family, too, was riddled with difficulties, but to our modern ears and eyes, it seems like such a fascinating trifle of a bygone era. Most films and books that I have seen (especially those made by Americans) tend to lay to the party line that kids can't wait to get themselves out from under the oppressive hands of their misunderstanding parents and authority figures.

Most of the younger readers in my class seemed too ready to dissect the book from a modern perspective, calling this family "dysfunctional" or thinking that (SPOILER ALERT) the father's appearance with a new Mrs. Bundren at the end of the book was shocking. Considering the era Faulkner is writing about, using modern terminology doesn't really work when talking about a novel like As I Lay Dying, and I think that quickly marrying someone new was probably not that out of the ordinary in Mississippi in that day and age.

I don't know if I'm trying to espouse some traditional family values party line or not. My view of this novel is probably colored with the fact that I didn't come from what we would view as a broken home and still hold fast to what the idea of family can mean. I am interested to know what others might think of this book whose ideas or memories of family aren't that pleasant. But I think that if you are willing to put your modern conceits and biases aside for the duration of this book, you will understand why this family would risk their lives and (in one case) sanity to fulfill their mother's dying wish.

Bob Ham has gotten rid of his record collection blog but you can track the progress of his life at http://vanpelt.blogspot.com

Norman Mailer, one of America's greatest novelists, bought the rights to Gilmore's story and, in 1979, published The Executioner's Song. The book is laid out as a fictional novel and narrates the story of Gilmore's last months, beginning with the days before he was released from prison on a previous conviction and driving right through to the impact of his eventual death.

Written with a stripped-bare prose, Executioner's Song is one of the most extraordinary books I've ever read. Over 1,000 pages long, the life of Gilmore and the people that surrounded him are exhaustively researched. All perspectives, from the NAACP activists who lobbied against Gilmore's execution to Gilmore's lonely mother, are introduced and objectively examined. The story, and the way that the execution impacts the lives of such a myriad of people, are entwined brilliantly. For such a massive undertaking, the pages fly by.

The main character, of course, is Gary Gilmore, a talented artist and poet who has lived a life of violent crime and prison stays. His charisma and creativity are obvious, and have the effect of conjuring sympathy, but Gilmore is also a self-obsessed sociopath. A large part of the narrative focuses on Gilmore's love affair with Nicole Baker, the book's most tragic and compelling character, a young woman with a history of abuse who finds nearly all of her worth in sexuality. Nicole is drawn to Gilmore like a cult, and her honesty with Mailer and her other interviewers offer most of the insight into how horrible the story of Gary Gilmore's life was.

It should be mentioned that Executioner's Song is not for the faint of heart. Sexuality plays heavily into the relationship between Nicole and Gary, and the accounts of Nicole's abuse and sexual history are extremely vivid and heartbreaking. No punches are pulled, and the result is a horrifying look at the sociopathic mind and the lives it affects.

Mailer's sparse writing style perfectly complements the Utah landscape and he writes each character with furious focus and impartiality. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980, and the story of Gary Gilmore is well-known to people over 40, but the story can be especially fascinating to a younger generation largely ignorant of the events leading up to Gilmore's execution.

Jordan Green lives in Portland, Oregon, a few miles from where Gary Gilmore grew up.

Jordan Green, Editor

1. Soldier of a Great War by Mark Helprin - A pristine novel that tells the story of a professor of aesthetics who is pulled violently into defending Italy during World War I. Helprin writes beauty, comedy and tragedy as well as anyone.

2. A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving - Irving's novel of a diminutive hero who believes he is an instrument of God is so vivid and engrossing that I did not want this book to end.

3. The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer - An astounding work of journalism and story-telling. The events surrounding the 1977 execution of Gary Gilmore are layed out with remarkable detail and accessibility.

Penny Carothers, Social Justice Editor

1. The Shackled Continent: Power, Corruption and African Lives by Robert Guest - Not only is this an entertaining read, but it changed the way I look at the world. 'Nuff said? If not, let's just say that the typical book about why some are poor and others aren't is a snooze -- economic tables, complicated formulas, math -- speak to the nth degree. Not so with Robert Guest. Guest's story takes us to Africa -- in all its misery and glory -- while making a very strong and persuasive argument about the role Africans must play in their own development.

Sam Albertson, Regular Contributor

1. Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer - This is a must-read for anyone serious about teaching from the heart or being a submissive learner.

2. The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton - As is typical for one of my all-time favorite authors, this read is enthralling and clever.

3. The Return of the Prodigal Son by Henri Nouwen - An intimate exegesis of Rembrandt's depiction of one of Christ's most illustrious parables.

Jason Pollock, Contributing Editor to The Ankeny Briefcase

1. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho - You can hear God whisper between the lines, regardless of how you define God. This book reminded me that some writers are gifted with a softness and a simplicity that allows eternal notions to be captured.

2. The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein - You know what it's like to go a very long time without eating pancakes and then one day, unexpectedly, you order them and are flooded with joy? This book is a lot like that.

3. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson - An approachable book on the science behind, well, everything. Science has revealed a breathtaking amount of knowledge. Scientists, on the other hand, have almost blown the whole dang thing.

Bob Ham, Regular Contributor

1. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon - This elegy to innocence lost is also a pseudo-detective story narrated by an autistic boy whose world is torn asunder by his parents'separation and the death of a beloved neighborhood dog. A tale as inspiring as it is heart-breaking, this book is, to be fair, an easy read, but that just means you will be ready to start reading it again as soon as you finish the last page.

2. One Man's Meat by E.B. White - A collection of essays that White wrote for The Atlantic Monthly from his farm in Maine echoes his fiction work in its breadth of descriptive power couched in the most economic prose. A naive and world weary look at one's autumn years.

3. Light In August by William Faulkner - An epic journey filled with flashbacks, ambling sentences and some of the most incredible characters you are ever likely to encounter. The story weaves its way through the lives of a pregnant girl in search of the father, the young man who falls for her, a rage filled man of mixed race , and a defrocked minister still living in the shadow of the Civil War. A difficult but ultimately gratifying read.

David James Poissant, Contributor

1. Music Through the Floor by Eric Puchner - In the nine stories of this debut collection, writer Eric Puchner explores the mystery and melancholy of life in modern America. Especially memorable is the haunting "Child's Play" in which a few boys become men over the course of one unsettling Halloween afternoon. If you want to know what's going on in the world of the contemporary short story, read this book.

2. Last Night by James Salter - A masterpiece from a superb practitioner of American fiction, Last Night is James Salter's latest collection of beautiful and disturbing stories. In the title story, a man struggles with an obligation to help his terminally ill wife die well and the guilt he feels for the affair he's carried on over the course of her sickness. In each story, Salter exposes life's moral complexities in his trademark lean and unforgettable prose.

3. The Dog of the Marriage by Amy Hempel - From the single-sentence "Memoir" to the thirty-five page "Offertory," Amy Hempel explores the versatility of the short story form in these razor-sharp nine pieces. In "Reference # 388475848-5," a woman addresses the Parking Violations Bureau of New York City to protest a ticket. Over the course of the letter, the writer reveals a harrowing episode from the week before that brings the matter of the ticket into startling perspective. There is no way to do Hempel's work justice in a review, but to read it is to place yourself in the hands of a master.

Bradly Fruhauff, Contributing Editor for The Ankeny Briefcase

1. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky - This translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, already fifteen years old, imbues this novel, already over one hundred years old, with all the wildness and fullness of a Karamazovian‚ rapture that certainly could not be lost on a reader with any mite of real human feeling left in his or her soul (to put it in Karamazovian terms).

2. Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community by Wendell Berry - Berry's book is countercultural precisely because it believes in culture, that is, culture as what makes a community and culture as what a community makes. This is a book of vision, a book that believes there are things worth preserving in this life and that human beings, acting in community, can in fact preserve them with admirable success. Berry's words are laden with a common sense that makes one believe it is truly possible, because it is so simple and plain.

3. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark - With charming wit and a tight control of the narrative reins, Spark develops her tale of loyalty and morality in a small Edinburgh girls' school. Her best-known work, this novel is at once highly entertaining and ethically challenging, asking the reader to take seriously that which the author mocks, and to love that which the narrative rejects.