The themes of truth, meaning and self-knowledge all stem, in Joshua Ferris’s latest novel, from the side-effects of a peculiarly modern crime: that of online identity theft. This is the story of that crime: as the pages go by, the lineage or genealogy, the mysterious origin, of this crime eventually branches out to include the putative victim as potential perpetrator.
First-person narrator and successful Park Avenue dentist, Paul O’Rourke exhibits an outward resistance to technology, refusing to create a website for his dental practice until someone comes along and does it for him. At first the ghost-written website is appealing to Paul’s staff insofar as it delivers basic information about his office and work. Things take a turn for the bizarre when the content included under Paul’s biography starts in on the history of the Amalekites, a supposedly Biblical tribe that was destroyed by the Israelites. The story proceeds to get very personal very quickly when, through progressively more detailed Twitter jottings, Facebook posts and updates to his biography, Paul’s online interloper suggests that he (Paul) is a member of the long-vanquished Ulms who were followers of Amalek.
It turns out that the remaining few descendants of the Ulms are being reconstituted though the painstaking efforts of a shadowy Svengali-like figure (Grant Arthur) and united on the soil of their putative homeland, Seir, located in Israel. If there is not enough here to more or less forcefully suggest that the Ulms are in some sense to be understood as a forerunner of the Jews, this point is brought home with a hammer blow when we discover that the Ulms, apparently, have been subjected to efforts at annihilation over and above those faced by the Jews.
From this point on, the tweets and posts begin to verge on the anti-Semitic and Paul’s colleagues and friends – including his Jewish ex-girlfriend Connie and her Uncle Stuart – begin to believe that Paul may indeed be their author. Uncle Stuart in particular detects parallels between Paul’s earlier obsession with the trappings and rituals of Judaism and the alternate Paul’s increasingly splenetic insistence on the central tenet of doubt in the Ulms religion to the point where the latter is essentially nothing but a set of customs collectively carried forward.
The effort here appears initially concerned with an investigation of the fates of religion, more particularly religiosity or piety in the experience of an American everyman. One is led to believe that our protagonist holds a vast reservoir of anxiety at bay through a hardened though amiable (to him at least) cynicism on the one hand and on the other a fetish for dating girls from families for whom religion is not only a key that deciphers the reality of the present moment but also a living heirloom that literally keeps the faith with the generations gone before. In contrast, the passages concerning the Ulms appear implausible at best; taken together, they leave the impression of an increasingly tiresome sequence of caricatures flattering to deceive.
Putting this to one side for a moment: let us just agree that a poor soul like Paul could fall prey to the lure of belonging, the promise of identity restored that Grant Arthur holds out to his Ulms. If we go along with this then the novel, for a shimmering moment, holds open the possibility of an extended aside or disquisition on the nature of a charismatic leader and the (not entirely reconciled) combination of fervor and abandon found amongst the followers.
In some ways this is what the novel anticipates: to be among the brethren is to be trapped in a peculiar kind of catch twenty-two: joining a sect or cult means believing that what is happening is at once driven by the individual and yet is also on another register created by the unoccupied space reserved for the idea or deity for which the cult’s tenets are propagated. While there are hints in the final third that this might be the novel’s proper concern, inklings and inferences are all we get.
Disturbed by Paul’s continuing dialogue with his online double, Uncle Stuart persuades Paul to visit the former wife of Grant Arthur and listen to recollections of her time spent with the founder/reviver of the Ulms. During the conversation it emerges that Grant Arthur had been in the process of converting to Judaism and wanted nothing more than the blessing of his soon-to-be wife’s father, Rabbi Mendelsohn. When the Rabbi discovers that Grant Arthur does not actually believe in but is rather more fascinated with the study of Judaism – as if it were nothing more than an ancient intellectual puzzle – he is deeply shocked that his daughter would associate with a blasphemer.
It appears that Uncle Stuart intended the encounter to provoke Paul to the point where he would recognize Grant Arthur and the Ulms as essentially fraudulent too: the essence of religion is god, religion without god puts faith in human hands and allows for a rhetoric of personality to invade the gap freed up by self-selecting adherents such as Paul. While Uncle Stuart does not come across as particularly devout it is nevertheless clear that, at a minimum, he absolutely believes in the necessity of maintaining (the illusion of) god at the heart of Judaism in particular and religion in general.
History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual and well as collective [action], which its “ruses” turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention.
-Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious
Questions concerning self-knowledge, meaning and truth are merely raised or at best rephrased in the course of this story: the protagonist appears never to get past an idle meandering though the landscape that comes along with these ideas and finally it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the author is playing with fire a bit here. The effort to break open these themes in the context of a dental practice in New York never really gets past a daisy chain of puns: funny enough in a one-and-done kind of way but at a fair remove from thinking historically about the present in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.
