Gods Without Men

Starred review from January 9, 2012
As characters in acclaimed British novelist Kunzru’s pitch-perfect masterwork tinker with machines for communicating with an interplanetary craft circling the Earth, their desperate quest for meaning is interrupted by a nonlinear mélange of other strange endeavors that span centuries and cross the Mojave Desert: British rocker Nicky Capaldi’s escape from L.A. in a convertible with a gold-plated Israeli handgun stowed in the glove box; beleaguered parents Jaz and Lisa Matharu’s disastrous vacation with their autistic four-year-old, Raj; former hippie commune “Guide” Judy’s return to the desert, strung out on meth; and traumatized Iraqi teen Laila’s participation as an actor in U.S. army war game facsimiles of Iraq. Presiding over it all are the Pinnacles, three fingers of rock that bear mute witness to Raj’s disappearance and the ensuing frantic search. Also on board are Fray Francisco Hermenegildo Tomás Garcés, a half-mad Jesuit missionary intent on converting Native Americans at the close of the 18th century; Deighton, a disfigured ethnologist, annoyed by the young, “half-educated” Eliza’s failure to recognize “the distinction he’d conferred on her by asking her to be his wife”; an aircraft mechanic named Schmidt working in the ’40s who feels betrayed by what the Enola Gay unleashed over Hiroshima; a working-class mother seduced by the possibility of fellowship with benevolent otherworldly beings; and a local girl who once lived with the hippies and who—even though she returns years later to run the motel where Nicky, Jaz, Lisa, and Raj briefly stay—suspects she has never quite returned. Kunzru’s (My Revolutions) ear for colloquial speech creates a cacophony that overlays his affectionate descriptions of the desolate landscape, creating a powerful effect akin to the distant cry of urgent voices crackling up and down the dial on a lonely drive through an American wasteland. Agent: Melissa Pimentel, Curtis Brown.

Starred review from December 15, 2011
Hopscotching across time, looking quizzically at space, Kunzru's marvelous novel uses diverse cultures (Native American, Catholic, Mormon, Wall Street, hippie UFO believers) to speculate on the nature of reality and religion, magic and mystery. The novel is anchored by a time, a place and a relationship. The core year is 2008; we visit several other time periods. The place is the Three Pinnacles rock formation in the Mojave Desert. The relationship involves Jaz, an assimilated American Sikh, and his Jewish-American wife Lisa. Instead of a linear narrative, we have the energizing cross-currents of history. In 1947, Schmidt, an aircraft mechanic and World War II vet traumatized by Hiroshima, is alone at the Pinnacles, hoping to attract extraterrestrials with his message of universal love. Success! A spacecraft lands; he's welcomed aboard. (That same year saw the alleged UFO crash-landing in Roswell, N.M.) Meanwhile in Brooklyn in 2008, Jaz and Lisa are raising their autistic son Raj. Seems it's easier to talk to aliens than for the Matharus to communicate with their four-year-old. Kunzru's portrait of their marriage is finely nuanced. They're a modern, secular couple, yet shreds of old beliefs divide them. When they visit the Pinnacles on vacation and Raj disappears, the marriage almost comes apart. The rocks may be a crossing point into the Land of the Dead; they have witnessed much drama. Schmidt met a fiery end when his homemade space capsule blew up. An anthology professor holed up there and went mad after betraying a Native source to a bloodthirsty white posse. A Spanish friar saw God there in the 18th century. As for our century's tarnished magic, the computer trading program overseen by Jaz generates millions but wrecks the Honduran economy (collateral damage), while our royalty, rock stars, are represented by a worthless narcissist. Ironies abound; mysteries multiply; there's a cliffhanger ending for Jaz and Lisa. Kunzru (My Revolutions, 2007, etc.) just gets better and better. This fourth novel is an astonishing tour de force.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 1, 2011

The author of such cogent, sharply observed works as The Impressionist and My Revolutions, Kunzru returns with his first book set entirely in the United States. (British-born Kunzru recently moved from London to New York, where he is a Fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.) While New Yorkers Jaz and Lisa Matharu are vacationing in the starkly beautiful Mojave Desert, their autistic son goes missing. As they desperately hunt for him, they discover that the desert is hardly empty; in an isolated town called the Pinnacles, they encounter a host of unusual characters, including a wasted British rock star, a former UFO cultie, and a black marine who has befriended an adolescent Iraqi immigrant serving as a "villager" in a military simulation exercise. Top of the pile for me.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2012
In his assured and very entertaining fourth novel, Kunzru roams back and forth in time, homing in on disparate groups of seekers, all of whom converge on the formidable Three Pinnacles rocks in the Mojave Desert. The characters include a dissolute British rock musician seeking to escape a bad recording session in L.A. by ingesting hallucinogens, a small-town girl seduced by the bizarre beliefs of a UFO cult, a miner who mistakes the ill effects of mercury poisoning for a mystical experience, and a goth-girl refugee from Iraq. But at the center of the novel is a wealthy New York couple who become the focus of a media firestorm when their autistic four-year-old son vanishes in the desert. The hostile and accusatory e-mails and Internet posts directed at the couple in the wake of their son's disappearance are just one of a number of brilliant flourishes Kunzru employs here as he explores humans' desperate search for meaningwhether it be through drugs, religion, computer programming, or UFOswithin the chaos of life, both modern and ancient. Working a subject that might easily have invited a heavy hand, Kunzru instead delivers a lively and frequently thrilling version of the quest novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

Starred review from February 1, 2012

In 2008, Jaswinder (Jaz) Singh Matharu, MIT grad and the rebellious Baltimore-bred son of a Punjabi family, heads to the Southwest with Jewish American wife Lisa and autistic son Raj. Along with drug-hazed London rocker Nicky Capaldi, to whom Raj takes a shine, they find themselves stuck (and coming unstuck) at a motel in a beautifully barren area where, we learn in multiple date-marked chapters, Fray Garces managed a mission (1778), Mormons murdered intruders (1871), the disaffected Schmidt seems to have seen a spaceship (1947), a community believing in extraterrestrials gathered (1958), a hippie commune emerged (1969), and, significantly, an ethnologist studying the disappearing Natives saw an Indian man walking with a ghostly white child (1920). Woven throughout is the tale of Coyote, who risks all to visit the Land of the Dead, and as time collapses and the multiple stories coalesce, Raj disappears. VERDICT At first somewhat slow as the various stories are laid out, this extraordinary novel by the estimable Kunzru (My Revolutions) gathers momentum, power, and a fierce clarity to deliver a rich panorama while detailing our mutual antagonisms and deepest spiritual needs (met, perhaps, with "a vast emptiness, an absence"). Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 9/11/11.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.