[In the following review, Smith is generally critical of The Life of Pi, asserting that Martel offers a confused discourse on religious faith.]

This ultra-linear novel [Life of Pi] begins with, and not after, an author's note from which a word is used to summarize travel in India: “bamboozle”—soon put to use at a train station when a clerk claims, “There is no bamboozlement here.” Publisher's Weekly revealed the bamboozlement of their reviewer by referring to Martel's “captivating honesty about the genesis of his story.” Martel lifted the idea for this novel from one by Moacyr Scliar about a Jewish zookeeper who ends up in a lifeboat with a panther. Now we have Pi, an Indian teenager on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Martel doles out name-play like chunks of hyena for the reader to chew on—comic relief from the cultish deluge of detail and gory animal behavior. Early in the story, during a youthful phase of comparative-theology samplings, Pi is bemused by Christianity's singular story. “Humanity sins but it is God's Son who pays the price?” He tries to imagine his father, a zookeeper without a religious bone in his body, feeding him to the lions to atone for their sins. Martel's brand of verbal alchemy loosens our grip on belief, allowing faith to pop up like any good mirage worth its salt. When Pi rules out killing the tiger in favor of taming him, a reciprocal relationship evolves. A bit of a MacGyver of the high seas, Pi relies on earthbound lessons (including the danger of anthropomorphism) to survive 227 days of staring Richard Parker down. Once back on dry land, two officials from the shipping company arrive to obtain information from Pi, who accepts the cookies they offer, collecting enough of them to miraculously offer them back to these disbelievers, who graciously accept and go forth to chronicle their findings as “unparalleled in the history of shipwrecks.” Do I believe in God after hearing Pi's story? I believe everyone has a story to illuminate faith, and each of these stories is the best.