The Year in Fiction (Vol. 99) | The Year in Fictionby Bruce Allen
The Year in Fiction by Bruce Allen
In a year not notable for experimental or even particularly unconventional fiction, the most audacious production may well have been a straightforward retelling of one of the most familiar of all stories. Walter Wangerin Jr.'s The Book of God, subtitled "The Bible as a Novel," indeed reshapes the separate books of the Old and New Testaments (beginning with the story of Abraham) into a single continuous narrative that is distinguished—if such is the right word—by both reasonably crisp summary and description and numbingly anachronistic dialogue. Perhaps the best one can say of it is what Samuel Johnson said when comparing a woman preaching with a dog walking on its hind legs: "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."
A rather more literary novel, Harry Mulisch's The Discovery of Heaven, grafts a plot that is quite literally made in heaven onto a richly observed exploration...
[The entire page is 6473 words long]
Navigate
