I promised to post the Fiction Book Club's choice for each month. Next up? God is Dead by Ron Currie, Jr. (Viking, out July 5, '07, in US).
I "met" Ron a couple of years ago through Francis Ford Coppola's grand gift to the writing community, Zoetrope. In that online writers site, I'd noticed Ron's clever comments and the controversy surrounding what has become this book's title story before The Sun magazine agreed to publish it. Then I read the story. Click on that last link and you'll understand why I've become an enthusiast.
Ron's new book is original, funny, troubling, insightful, and embarrassing at moments when we recognize ourselves in characters whom we might otherwise shun. I'm reading it for the second time now (truth: book club meets on July 9 and I don't want to sound stupid), finding phrases/ideas/etc that hit me the first time through bowling me over again: that God reports to someone else, that a cow falls over as if she "understands gravity but doesn't agree with it," that you can report an interview with a dog using only the letter Q for the question. Very clever, forceful prose. Oh, the premise: God returns to earth as a Dinka woman in Darfur and is killed in the insane slaughter there. What happens next comprises the rest of the book. Imagine...and Ron can.
Good reviews to date: he's got a highly-coveted star from Kirkus
Review (""Mordant...abrasively funny...Kurt Vonnegut laced with
Louis-Ferdinand Celine"), an endorsement from Publisher's Weekly, more
to come. Foreign editions are in the works in Germany, the UK, Bulgaria
(!), and Italy.
