Word: goldstein
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...story is not entirely an intellectual adventure. Throughout the novel, Goldstein uses playful, everyday occurrences to creatively broach serious topics, deftly interweaving such diverse concepts as probability theory, the mind-body problem, and theodicy with Cass’s relationship issues and dinner conversations. Of course, innumerable thinkers over many centuries haven’t definitively solved the problem of evil, and Goldstein isn’t going to do it over dessert, but she does succeed in accessibly introducing a classic conundrum to her audience in the flow of her storytelling. So long as readers recognize that the positions...
...Goldstein can introduce so many abstract concerns because she chooses here, as in many of her other books, to make her characters professional scholars, a territory she knows well. Seltzer’s academic career is narrated by Goldstein—a former fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, among other posts—with the skill of an insider. Given Goldstein’s background, Harvard students may find much that is familiar in Seltzer’s story. He works at a predominantly Jewish university named for a famous Jewish jurist—not Brandeis...
...boy’s hair until his third birthday an “upshneering” instead of the Yiddish “upsherin”—and her Klapper character deduces the numerical value of his Hebrew name using a form of gematria so obscure that Goldstein is either being very clever with his dialogue or is in error...
...That Goldstein is much more at home in the academic realm than in the religious gradually becomes clear. For all her novel’s ambition to portray and explain the modern religious experience, it is unable to shake sufficiently free of its author’s initial presumptions. Like many new atheist tracts, “36 Arguments for the Existence of God” paints the religion-and-reason question in Manichean terms. This sort of framing can highlight sharp distinctions in philosophies, but doesn’t begin to approach the varieties of religious experience?...
...Goldstein seems to be overlooking the very real people in between her extremes. Where is the celebrated Princeton philosopher Saul Kripke—a real life Azarya, who taught at MIT while a Harvard undergrad, himself an observant Jew and critic of materialism—and where is Harvard’s own Hilary Putnam, who writes on Jewish thought and prays at Harvard Hillel, or Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project and a believing Christian...