Many stories, overlapping

By Hari Kunzru

Alfred A. Knopf. 384 pp. $26.95

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Reviewed by Richard Burgin

Like the desert in which it is set, Hari Kunzru's

Gods Without Men

is a novel that is simultaneously simple and complex, clear and ambiguous.

It's accessible because of Kunzru's lucid, often vivid, use of language (though he's better at narrative prose than he is at dialogue) and characters that are convincing and relatively easy to identify with. Kunzru also gives the novel more cohesion and clarity by having all the major characters drawn to the Mojave desert, especially to a group of three large rocks called the Pinnacles, where their interlocking stories unfold.

The book is complicated and somewhat ambiguous, however, because it is told not only from many different characters' points of view but also from different points in time, from 1775 to 2009. While one can follow the different stories with a reasonable effort and perceive how, at times, they echo each other (as well as various other aesthetic pleasures they offer), their ultimate meaning appears by design to be considerably more resistant to apprehension.

Kunzru, the British-born author of three previous, well-received novels (The Impressionist, Transmission, and My Revelations) is a skilled realist and an inventive storyteller. His gallery of characters in this novel includes a girl victimized by an extraterrestrial-worshiping cult, an 18th-century Spanish priest traveling by himself through the desert in the hope of converting the natives to Christianity, and a tormented British rock star fleeing his bandmates and producer. At the novel's center, however, are Jaz, an American-born Indian and rising corporate businessman, his headstrong Jewish American wife, Lisa, and their autistic 4-year-old son, Raj, who wanders off and gets lost in the desert. Jaz is the most compelling character, and his reactions to the loss and reappearance of his son are the most heartrending and suspenseful parts of the novel.

While Kunzru has a penchant for sensationalistic events and occasional stereotypical characters like Nick, the debauched rock star, or Dawn, the former abused hippie and cult member at whose motel Nick, Jaz, Lisa, and Raj all stay, his passionate yet controlled prose allows him to steer clear of melodrama. He's particularly effective in describing the unraveling of Jaz and Lisa's relationship, especially after their son's disappearance irrevocably alters their former liberal, upper-middle-class view of the world. Here is Lisa, in a New York subway, observing her fellow passengers with fresh eyes and a disturbing new vision:

"They looked so ugly to her, all the morning people, because when Raj went missing she'd seen the flipside of their self-assurance; the outrage when something unknowable reared up before them, not just unknown for now, because they or their designated expert had yet to enquire into the matter, had yet to Google the search term or send the email or write the check for the correct amount to the relevant company or government department, but unknowable in principle, inaccessible to human comprehension."

This theme of the inscrutability of life, of what Kunzru later calls "the fiction of the essential comprehensibility of the world," receives its most penetrating expression in the story of Jaz and his family. It's particularly resonant when Raj is found, miraculously cured of his autism, and Jaz begins to doubt that Raj is, in fact, his son.

The problem with Gods Without Men is that not all of its interwoven stories are equally interesting and not all of them interlock effectively. One finds oneself, at times, anxiously waiting for the story to return to Jaz and Lisa, though she is a considerably less appealing character than he is.

Kunzru is a writer who, like John Fowles, knows how to build suspense despite his book's layered complexities. Throughout the novel, he provides a way to interpret its numerous mysteries from either a rational or a supernatural point of view, especially the book's powerful, though unresolved, ending.

Kunzru's Gods Without Men is an engaging, hugely ambitious novel, of which one could say, as André Gide said of Céline, it is not reality that he paints but the hallucination that reality provokes. Readers who prefer a clear or less open-ended conclusion may feel disappointed, but there is still much to entertain them along the way.