THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF GOD
By Julius Lester
St. Martin's. 247 pp. $23.95
The God of Judaism is omnipresent yet incorporeal. This divinity speaks to Moses through the symbol of a burning bush, announcing inscrutably through the flames, "I am that I am." The commandments that Moses receives at Mount Sinai forbid the Hebrews from representing their God in a human form, as the pagans of the ancient world did. And in his series of orations to the former slaves he is leading toward the Promised Land, Moses reminds them that "you saw no shape when the Lord your God spoke to you."
To the novelist and observant Jew Julius Lester, these theological injunctions must have offered an irresistible temptation -- not to blaspheme in his religious practice but to shatter the taboo in his art. In his ambitious new novel, "The Autobiography of God," Lester has placed the Almighty on Earth: chain-smoking, no less, in the home of a female rabbi at a Vermont college. Or, at the least, he has put a palpable, three-dimensional God so deeply inside her imagination that she believes she converses with Him.
One can admire the audacity of Lester's literary risk while at the same time acknowledging, with genuine regret, that the choice undermines this otherwise accomplished work. Lester means to address the great ontological question of how and why God allows the existence of evil. He makes that evil incarnate in two powerful and interwoven ways. At the same time that Rebecca, the college rabbi, comes into possession of a Torah scroll from a Jewish community in Poland that had been exterminated by the Nazis, she learns that one of her students has been murdered.
Lester would have had more than enough material, in both narrative and moral terms, had he merely followed Rebecca's efforts to hold fast to her faith amid the evidence of such human brutality. In fact, the portions of the book when he does so work wonderfully. He makes Rebecca (whose surname is never given) a complex and engaging character, a daughter of Holocaust survivors whose own experience of the cruel universe came when she was struck by a car and disabled as an 8-year-old child. In adulthood, she suffers not only the residual limp from that accident but personal and spiritual impediments as well -- a tendency to be reclusive after her marriage's collapse, a nagging worry that she lacks the wisdom that others assume she possesses. (In much of her self-doubt, she brings to mind another finely etched female rabbi from this literary season, Deborah Green in Jonathan Rosen's "Joy Comes in the Morning.")
A college professor as well as an author, Lester situates Rebecca within the academic community of John Brown College, and he unerringly paints the environment of a small liberal-arts school. With perfect pitch, he captures faculty chitchat with its mixture of wit, one-upmanship and hidden rage. He convincingly depicts the middle-aged professor who serves as mentor, lover, stalker and finally murderer of a beautiful student. The quality of Lester's portraiture more than compensates for his haste in resolving the mystery of the crime.
Much bigger problems arrive, however, whenever Lester departs the natural world for the supernatural one. Shortly after Rebecca receives the Torah scrolls, she hears ghosts of the slain Jews saying kaddish, the memorial prayer. The ghost of a woman begins talking with Rebecca. Then the spirit delivers the rabbi a box containing the divine autobiography of the novel's title. And then God Himself shows up in her house for a series of conversations.
To merely recount those episodes does not convey the damage they do to the novel. They are not only unnecessary and intrusive devices; they wind up being unintentional self-parodies, as if bits of Mel Brooks's shtick or the movie "Oh, God!" (featuring George Burns in the title role) had been cut and pasted into a serious work of fiction. The ghosts, for instance, repeatedly make statements such as: "This is something we never heard of -- a woman rabbi. Would you believe that even after you're dead you have to keep learning and making adjustments? Oy! It's not easy being dead, you know. It's not what you think. When you're alive, you think death is like sleep. You should be so lucky."
As for God, Lester has Him appear to Rebecca in the uniform of a Nazi storm trooper and later in the form of Hitler. Theologically, this is a compelling idea, and it gets right at Judaism's belief that God created both good and evil, giving human beings the free will to choose. And so immense was the evil of the Holocaust, the author and survivor Elie Wiesel has written, that it couldn't have happened with God, and it couldn't have happened without God. In a more general way, Lester's concept of God's wanting -- indeed needing -- to talk to Rebecca brings to mind the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel's influential book "God in Search of Man."
Still, the notion of actually dressing up God as a Nazi is so specific, so literal, as to be not disturbing or provocative but ridiculous. A reader does not need God in a black shirt and jackboots to be made aware of the most horrendous inhumanity taking place in what people of faith consider God's world. Surely a writer of Lester's manifold gifts had other, subtler tools at his disposal. There is a lot of artistic room between the burning bush and the costume racks of "The Producers."
