Young Miami couple Murphy and Eva have almost decided to have a baby when Yahweh, the Old Testament God, appears to Eva and makes an unwelcome demand: He wants her to be his prophet and embark with Murphy on a wild road trip across the country to fulfill incomprehensible demands and arcane rituals as they go.
...captivating ... impassioned is Aaron Thier’s wonderfully zany new novel, The World Is a Narrow Bridge ... told in ambitious floating paragraphs that cover an absurdist range of subject matter, including neutrinos, Matt Damon, rain shadows and the systematic genocide of indigenous peoples ... The humor is essential here ... While the novel sags in moments of tangential exposition, its prose is powerful, filled with dread and compassion — a welcome surrealist take on Alexis de Tocqueville.
With deep tenderness and a wonderful, feather-light sense of humor, Mr. Thier rehearses ancient conundrums over free will and the existence of evil while itemizing the blessings that make life worth the suffering ... Despite its irreverence, The World Is a Narrow Bridge is genuinely religious, a book that looks at existence with equal measures of fear, humility and gratitude. In a time when novelists tend to be more concerned with psychology than the soul, that makes it a rare and valuable thing.
... thoughtful ... the moments where Thier suspends his gentle skewering of the sorts of people Murphy and Eva represent are genuinely wonderful ... The World Is a Narrow Bridge... is as rudderless as its characters in search of something meaningful. It tells a story about wandering aimlessly while literally wandering and digressing in a narrative sense, dipping and curving along pathways of thought and philosophy, jumping among seeming non sequiturs that charm as often as they frustrate ... The structure of the prose matches the plot of the story, which is stylistically clever but doesn't translate into seamless enjoyment.
