MixedThe New York Times Book Review... it’s initially thrilling to see a talented novelist promise to nakedly confront [big questions]...But as with all such acts, it’s a sad fact that safety nets reduce the thrill ... A place not only superbly rendered but one with resonance ... Father Julius jumps off the page. And he’s not the only one: From the murderous twins clad in bishop red to the bearded female trapeze artist, you want to deny the reality of these characters, but can’t. In sum, they’re strong inventions ... One shudders to imagine what Moxon would do with the means to make a horror movie ... It all makes for an engrossing setup whose suspense is difficult to resist. But cheap entertainment usually comes at a cost ... Initial intrigue has devolved into plain magic, and magic is a dangerous ingredient for a work that has explicitly signaled a desire to address questions of faith and social justice. For magic will gift you superficial momentum, true, but only while reducing the power of the quotidian ... Perhaps it’s because of this danger, then, that Moxon sometimes slips into some bad writing. Not bad on a molecular, sentence-by-sentence level; there the prose mostly excels. But at altitude, brutal sadism clashes with puerility. There are special powers and talismans and fate and prophecies and even (or inevitably?) a demented superhero. These magical contrivances emerge conveniently and just in the nick of time to serve nothing beyond plot utility. It’s the kind of bad writing you see in unapologetic genre work or, worse, prestige television, where failed novelists go to be flattered by failed readers ... [a] tepid, unpersuasive ending ... Ultimately, the novel wants the cachet of strongly gesturing at subjects like theology and socioethical philosophy, but is unwilling to do the hard work that, admittedly, nearly no one is clamoring for. So while we get multiple passing references to the prison-industrial complex being the present-day instantiation of Morris’s perversity, these then lie inert. Similarly, the elements ostensibly centered on theodicies and determinism are frustratingly low-level, and it’s here that the novel’s extensive reliance on magic most impairs deep inquiry. It’s just difficult to invest all that much in a character’s crisis of faith when he can turn himself into sandals. Deep subjects require at least medium depth of treatment. And while there’s no requirement that a work must exhaust any subject it points to, wouldn’t 600 pages of fiction be just the vehicle to do so?... a novel of expertly rendered horrors, the relative shallowness also disturbs, and thereby detracts. And maybe it’s unfair to ask that an author this skilled at invention, character and style also exhibit proficiency in philosophy and theology. But a reader can dream, no?
