I picked up a copy of Rebecca Goldstein’s novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction. The work had been well reviewed as contemporary philosophical novel of note.

But I was disappointed. 36 Arguments isn’t a bad novel. In fact, it’s well written. But I wanted more.

It was neither a true roman a philosophe (as something by Voltaire, Goethe or Sartre) nor a great addition to the line of c0mic novels about academia (the standard being set by Amis’ Lucky Jim, though I would also add Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels).

As a philosophical novel, you could see some murmurings, as characters represented various points of extremes on the scale of rationalism and science on one end and anti-rationalist mysticism and poetry. But to work in this way, it frankly needed to be more didactic.

As something in the tradition of Lucky Jim, the conflicts were, well unconflicted, even by the standards of the genre.