To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

Imagine this book as the spiritual autobiography of secular, skeptical modernity. The protagonist is a thirty-something dentist in New York City, fairly well off. He spends his days bustling around his office thinking sardonic thoughts. He spends his nights eating takeout and watching the Boston Red Sox. Then suddenly, his identity is stolen, and he is caught up in the religion of Ulm; a religion of doubt.

This book is ostensibly about religion. But I would say that it's about alienated men who have a yearning to belong. They yearn to belong to a family, a religion, something that will give their lives meaning. The male characters, in particular our protagonist, go about attaching themselves to women of various faiths. The relationships always end badly, because the men seek not love, but rather the family and religion the women can provide. And what's left at the end? The religion of Ulm; a religion of doubt. No resolution, no catharsis. The book ends where it begins. I felt rather empty when I finished it.

But at least Joshua Ferris is a damn good writer! His prose sparkles with a mordant wit that tickles you into laughter and admiration. While the novel ultimately doesn't work, it leaves you with gems like this (the protagonist's thoughts on baseball): "Baseball is the slow creation of something beautiful. It is the almost boringly paced accumulation of what seems slight or incidental into an opera of bracing suspense. The game will threaten never to end, until suddenly it forces you to marvel at how it came to be where it is and to wonder at how far it might go. It's the drowsy metamorphosis of the dull into something indescribable."