This could be the setup for a Maeve Binchy or Anita Shreve novel, and it is no insult to Laird to say that he moves things along as expertly as any bestselling novelist would. In a few exquisite vignettes, he introduces his characters and conveys the essence of love or pain, often with a simple gesture ... In a domestic drama — and Modern Gods is at heart just that — shuttling back and forth between Ballyglass and Papua New Guinea is a risky maneuver. But Laird is an agile writer who effortlessly switches location and point of view without sacrificing the empathy we feel for each character ... But Laird is at his best on his home turf. A poet as well as a novelist, he has a well-tuned ear for the speech of his native place and a keen eye for Northern Ireland’s shifting light and brooding sky.

The characters in Modern Gods traverse oceans, time zones and political situations as part of Laird’s project to pry apart the very structures of worship and locate the systems they have in common, among them storytelling and ritual cruelty ... Laird dazzles ear and eye with his kinetic prose, animating city, countryside and, later, tropical jungle ... Whereas the inner lives of Stephen, Alison, Liz’s parents and the victims of the pub shooting are rendered with deftness and sympathy, Liz remains something of a cipher; her fears, desires and grief — if she has it — remain opaque. This thin characterization becomes manifest in the New Ulster sections of the novel, where we’re confined to Liz’s perception ... Still, the dynamism Laird has conjured in New Ulster — a trill of incipient violence; a mass imbibing of a hallucinogen that leaves the BBC producer prone and vomiting — keeps us reading, and the tragic climax resonates powerfully with the Northern Ireland sections of the novel. Apart from any theory, the events of the story leave a vivid impression of the opportunistic mythmaking, sectarian conflict and pragmatic greed at the heart of these religious systems.

As long as Liz is in Ulster, this double perspective remains. Laird continues to serve up a sharp, entirely recognizable, and sometimes funny account of the tensions and pleasures of a family reunion. But with Liz’s help, he also continues to draw our attention to those unnoticed myths—both political and personal ... the New Ulster sections too often read like dutiful pieces of straight anthropology: well written, certainly; fully realized, probably; fully felt, not so much ... Because the Melanesian section ends in murderous violence too, the book ends with Liz and Alison back at their parents’ house, taking refuge in what Alison had called the 'cult' of the family. But it also seems as if, after all the troubling questions he’s raised, Laird is taking refuge there as well...By finishing this way, Laird is perhaps implying that personal myths are easier to correct than political ones. Yet even if that’s true (and little else in the novel has led us to believe it), such an oddly happy ending seems distinctly inadequate as a response to all that’s gone before. Nevertheless, the primary problem with Modern Gods is still that, for all his efforts, Laird never properly convinces us that we can learn much about Ulster Protestants by studying a Melanesian cargo cult. Ironically, this leaves the novel feeling like an instance of the parallel universe becoming visible—as if two separate books existed and somehow inhabited the very same space.

Society’s darkest impulses are on graphic display in Nick Laird’s novel, which takes on the atrocities committed in the name of religion and politics ... Mr. Laird is alive to the ways that adamant moral certitudes tend toward violence. 'Righteous fury is so easy, can be slipped on like a coat,' he writes. Yet the novel’s real source of discomfort is not its ideas but its prose. Modern Gods opens with a dramatization of the mass shooting in the pub ... Mr. Laird, a poet as well as a novelist, has a gift for language—but I wish he hadn’t made these awful scenes so pretty.

Modern Gods is Laird’s third novel and his best by some distance...Laird seems to have found a way of marrying his poet’s sensitivity to the importance of the well-chosen word with a more rigorous, driving narrative voice ... The novel is an innately comic form and Modern Gods is a very funny novel. I was reminded often of another great comic chronicler of the contemporary family, Anne Enright. Like Enright in The Green Road and The Gathering, Laird’s book does what great novels do, using its humour to illuminate the deepest reaches of the human experience. With Modern Gods, Laird marks himself out as a first-rate novelist, applying his virtuoso linguistic skills and acute ear for dialogue to a subject — religion — that is rarely well-handled in fiction.

When Modern Gods stays within the bounds of this closely observed family story — about Alison's shot at happiness thwarted by the power of the past; about Liz's reckoning with the price she's paid for leaving Ballyglass — it's an engrossing spin on Laird's signature theme of reinvention. But Modern Gods doesn't stay within those bounds. It gets antsy or maybe even anxious about sticking to the traditionally female terrain of domestic drama, and so in its second half the novel goes seriously haywire. Think Heart of Darkness without its colonialist weight or A Handful of Dust without the laughs ... The novel starts out with a lot of promise, but like the beliefs and conventions it punctures, Modern Gods itself ends up being a lot of wild blather.

Laird’s writing in these Papua New Guinean chapters has a grave, melancholy grace ... This half of the book is, oddly, more convincing than the Northern Irish one. There is an explosive revelation back in Ballyglass when Alison finds out the day after her wedding that her tight-lipped new husband was involved, two decades ago, in an atrocity based on events that took place in Londonderry in 1993. But her resulting soul-searching seems perfunctory; her reluctance to ask any real questions about the past, compared with her sister’s intelligent probing, disappointing ... Laird has given us a richly textured geography of the human need to believe in something, and of the stories, religious and secular, we live by.

Laird has written a truly superb novel exploring the possibilities and impossibilities of forgiveness ... Though Liz’s experiences are salient, its Allison’s fate, thoroughly chilling and unsettling, that is the highlight.

...the novel still feels like two tonally different novels imperfectly stitched together, one a Paul Theroux–esque exploration of a foreign land from an outsider perspective, the other a more Anne Enright–ish domestic study mainly concerned with Allison pressing Stephen to reckon with his past. Only occasionally does Laird oversell the connection between the two threads. But though faith and family remain topic A throughout, the dramas and circumstances on Ireland and PNG are so different that the connection feels forced. Two intriguing storylines that, like feuding family members, have a hard time talking to one another.