They walked and shouted and walked and shouted, turning wider and wider circles around the rocks until their voices were hoarse in their parched throats and their clothes were coated in fine white dust. Even as his head spun and sweat soaked his back, Jaz felt as if an IV were pumping cold gel through his veins. The world was far away; he was trapped somewhere else, somewhere dead and bone-white, outside time and space. He thought perhaps he should look for prints, the ridged soles of a child's sneaker, but any trace had been obliterated by his own tracks, crossing and recrossing the same ground.
Lisa and Jaz's son Raj is a terror: non-verbally autistic, he screams and throws tantrums on an hourly basis. Though Jaz's finance job has made them quite wealthy, they avoid most hotels, choosing to stay at cheap motels when traveling--which of course they do infrequently. Though they avoid saying it to each other directly, Raj has destroyed their relationship with each other, already strained by the cultural differences between their Jewish and Punjabi families. When visiting the Mojave Desert in California, Raj suddenly disappears, thrusting Lisa and Jaz into the national spotlight. And when Raj suddenly reappears, he has become patient, calm, and even begins to speak. What happened to him in the desert? Jaz wonders, is this really his son at all?
Lisa and Jaz's story is the main narrative of Hari Kunzru's God Without Men, but it's only one thread among many: Kunzru weaves in stories of the desert going back to the 19th century. A Spanish Jesuit and explorer encounters mysterious Indian practices; an obsessive anthropologist seeks revenge on the Indian man who stole his wife; a cult calling itself the Ashtar Galactic Command springs up there, claiming to be able to contact an advanced alien race who wish to bring peace to mankind. It's strongly suggested--I think--that, when the anthropologist in the 1920's spots a "glowing child" walking with his Indian rival in the desert, that the child is Raj, having slipped through some sort of time portal, but then again, Raj is not the only child to have disappeared in this place. A cult leader's daughter also disappears, only to reappear years later--though whether it is really her or just someone willing to play the part of a long lost daughter is unclear.
I recently wrote a book that shares a lot of qualities with Gods Without Men. (A book needing representation, if you happen to be an agent, wink wink!) It revolves around the disappearance of a young child, and it's told in a multivocalic way, through several rotating third person points-of-view. So when I say this book doesn't quite work on a fundamental basis, I wonder if that feeling is something of an anxious projection on my part. But Gods Without Men just has too many parts. When Raj is rediscovered, for example, it's by a young Iraqi refugee girl who has moved to the desert to take part in a training program for US soldiers in a pretend Iraqi village. The story itself is fascinating, but it lacks any strong connection to the main narrative. Similarly, the book sets up as important early on a washed-up British rocker who has come to the desert to record a Laurel Canyon-type album with his band, but this character ends up being more or less irrelevant to the book as a whole. Each of these pieces is engaging on its own, but taken together, the main thing I felt was impatience: Come on, get back to Lisa, Jaz, and Raj. The danger with these types of novels--and I feel this in my own book, too--is that they make it so any empathy you might for any specific character or conflict is incredibly slow to develop.
The slightly-too-complex structure of Gods Without Men, I think, conceals a vacuity at its heart. There is a pleasing mystery to what is going on, exactly, in the Mojave (He doesn't say it, but contextually Kunzru seems to be writing about a remote section of Joshua tree National park), but the novel essentially waves a hand at it as if to say, isn't this all so mysterious? I don't need the novel to give me any hard science-fiction version of what happens to Raj when he disappears, or what the cult members are actually doing when they think they're talking to the "Ascended Masters," but in the place of possibilities Kunzu provides what is, essentially, a vibe.
I don't want to get too negative; I actually enjoyed this book, though it failed to come together for me. Kunzru is an excellent writer on a sentence level, and he does a good job with the Mojave, a truly alien and forbidding landscape if there ever was one. And like I said, each piece itself is engaging--but I wanted them actually to come together, rather than seeming as if they came together.
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