The Mind-Spirit Problem

By Megan Marshall ’77, RI ’07, reviewer

36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Pantheon; $27.95, 416 pp.

Sometimes a novelist of steady, sterling output will gain a reputation as “a writer’s writer.” Her distinctive style and powers of invention sustain a level of excellence that other novelists admire, talk about, and learn from. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein has achieved this status with her six previous works of fiction, not to mention her innovative biographies of Spinoza and Kurt Godel.

But Goldstein might better be termed “a thinker’s writer,” a category she could be said to have invented all on her own. Her first book, The Mind-Body Problem (1985), with its brainy philosopher-heroine married young to a seemingly benign math genius, has long been the thinking woman’s favorite novel, appealing to generations of smart young women uncertain about how to put their lives together after grad school. Readers could forget their worries and enjoy Goldstein’s riffs on higher math and logic until—happy surprise!—they found she was discoursing just as enjoyably (and edifyingly) on sex, love, and marriage.

Successive novels ventured into other realms of science and different historical eras. The brooding Dark Sister (1991) imagined a day in the life of William James, on which the mind-scientist visits an eccentric woman astronomer whose sister fears she is going mad; Goldstein made all this entirely, deliciously, believable. Properties of Light (2000) introduced readers to a family of physicists in 1970s Princeton, cultlike in their devotion to the one true way of understanding the universe.

In Goldstein’s novels, the border between understanding and belief, hard knowledge and supple intuition, is always in question. And so it comes as no surprise to open 36 Arguments for the Existence of God and meet a lovable psychologist-hero who is intent on disproving every one of those arguments. Goldstein’s latest novel might have been titled “The Mind-Spirit Problem,” because her vibrant cast of characters struggle to reconcile the bitter truths their minds insist on with an equally persistent desire in their hearts to do good and to infuse the world with meaning.

If there is a poetry of philosophy, Goldstein has written it in her chapter titles: “The Argument from the Improbable Self”; “The Argument from Dappled Things”; “The Argument from the Irrepressible Past.” And then, as novelist, she weaves a satisfying plot through these chapters, tracing a week in the life of Professor Cass Seltzer, whose success with a book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, has lifted him into the academic A-League, wreaking havoc in his personal life. Part puzzle, part poem, part psychological profile, part philosophical praxis—this book is all Goldstein, and her devoted readers (writers and thinkers) will be grateful once again.

Illustration by Adam McCauley; photo of Rebecca Newberger Goldstein by Tony Rinaldo