James Wood, Haiti Between God and a Hard Place

[alice wellintown]

23 January 2010, Boston,  reprinted in NY Times Op-Ed 24 January 2010

Wood's binary here is one of the most important ideas in Pynchon's
fiction, indeed, it is one of the most important ideas in American
Fiction: the Puritan vs. Deistic God in the Americas.

Between God and a Hard Place


Terrible catastrophes inevitably encourage appeals to God. We who are,
at present, unfairly luckier, whether believers or not, might reflect
on the almost invariably uncharitable history of theodicy, and on the
reality that in this context no invocation of God beyond a desperate
appeal for help makes much theological sense. For either God is
punitive and interventionist (the Robertson view), or as capricious as
nature and so absent as to be effectively nonexistent (the Obama
view). Unfortunately, the Bible, which frequently uses God’s power
over earth and seas as the sign of his majesty and intervening power,
supports the first view; and the history of humanity’s lonely
suffering decisively suggests the second.

James Wood, the author of the novel “The Book Against God,” is a staff
writer at The New Yorker.