The kugel remains

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein apparently isn't in Ian McEwan's league, as I hopefully suggested on January 13 that she might be. I'm not much enjoying her 2000 novel, Properties of Light, and the review I just read of her newest, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, doesn't inspire me to read it. In the review ("Prove It," in the January 31 New York Times Book Review), its author, Liesl Schillinger, writes:

...Goldstein's lofty psycho-religio-philosophical subtext, or rather metatext, doesn't gray her roman à clef about love, Jewish cultural identity, and academic infighting. She sews her philosophical inquiry to the material of everyday life...All the same, the stitches that join Goldstein's men, women, and themes show more in this novel than they do in her others....
    In 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Goldstein shows that philosophers and scholars may construct as many proofs or disproofs of divinity as they like. But to people of faith such questions remain as inarguable as the persistence of kugel. [emphasis mine]
    [An] "Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature, and Values," [a character who Schillinger says could have been based on Yale's emeritus professor Harold Bloom], or someone uncannily like him, [proposes to a graduate student that he write his dissertation on] the traditional Jewish Sabbath meal of cholent (bean and potato stew) and kugel (pudding)....[p. 10]

Sorry if my January 13 post got you all excited.

And me. Still, though, reviewers often mislead us. I'll browse the book when I find a library that has it. Anyway, the novel is said to come

with an appendix that lists and refutes 36 arguments for the existence of God...To taste their rigor, sample No. 20, the Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance, which travels from Premise 1 ("In a million years, nothing that happens now will matter") to Premise 4 ("It is intolerable...that in a million years nothing that happens now will matter") to Premise 8 ("God exists"). [Goldstein] dismisses this argument as "the fallacy of wishful thinking."

That has to be fun.

Seriously, though, it's true. We humans, thrown here as we are, with our artistic consciousnesses, our imaginations, how we do rail against that and other intolerabilities. The intolerability that really bad people won't be punished (beyond what minor pains of conscience they may succeed in feeling before they die). The intolerability that our parents' bodies lie in cold graves back in our hometowns, that our bodies will lie somewhere too, someday, if we don't try to ensure that they will be cremated.
    Can our sadness at these intolerabilities be all we need to know of why religion has such a tight grip on some of us?