Gods Without Men

By Hari Kunzru

(Knopf)

Early in “Gods Without Men,” Hari Kunzru’s ambitious and wonderful new novel, a strung-out British rock star stares into the big night sky hanging over the Mojave Desert.

“The stars were like pinholes in a cloth,” he marvels. “You could believe you were seeing through to some incredibly bright world on the other side of the darkness.”

It’s a great image, in a book filled with terrific writing.

But it’s also a pithy description of the dangerous American dream that grabs hold of Kunzru’s characters and won’t let go: the utopian belief that a bright new world can repair what the darkened old one has broken.

Most of Kunzru’s pilgrims, many loosely modeled on historical figures, eventually go searching for renewal in the Mojave ― the final frontier at the end of the land.

Leaping backward and forward in time, Kunzru places his seekers between 1775 ― the year that launched the American Revolution ― and 2009, as the last of them gaze upon the “vast emptiness” of the desert in the dying light.

In between, we meet a Spanish friar visited by an angel; a Mormon renegade, steeped in a biblical language of vengeance and blood; an ethnologist who helps destroy the native peoples he wants to save; and a World War II vet trying to communicate with extraterrestrials so he can “get back right with the world.”

The bulk of Kunzru’s novel is set in 1969-’71 and 2008-’09, as two more utopian projects go awry.

The first involves a commune standing at the crossroads between “Star Trek” and Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. Kunzru tells their story through Dawn, who joins because “she wanted to be part of something bigger than herself, to clap her hands in the circle and sometimes get up to dance” while experiencing “Divine Universal Love.”

As this passage suggests, Kunzru’s satire can be broad, often reducing minor players ― sheriffs and hippies, soldiers and financiers ― to rubble.

But Kunzru can also be a generous, big-hearted writer, and he always pulls back in time to save leading characters like Dawn, who will need all the salvation he offers after the commune turns violent and her fantasy become a nightmare ― true to form, in a novel where dreams of totality inevitably curdle, becoming totalitarian instead.

Kunzru is most compassionate toward the troubled couple at the center of his narrative: Jaz and Lisa Matharu , who travel to the desert to rescue their marriage and instead wind up losing Raj, their autistic 4-year-old son.

The Matharu marriage ― joining the smart but provincial son of Sikh immigrants and the cultured and beautiful daughter of secular Jews ― is another iteration in “Gods” of the utopian longing to overcome difference.

Although they are divided by race, class and culture, the Matharus marry in the belief that love will conquer all.

Their troubled son sorely tests that resolve, while also smudging romanticized views of innocence lost, in a novel that ruthlessly interrogates our yearning for Eden.

As Kunzru makes clear, the gates to paradise are closed; blown backward into the future, his characters can only gaze in longing on the world before the smash. Trying to go back, Kunzru tells us, is a mistake ― one that robs us of the imperfection and consequent comedy of being human.

And, Kunzru suggests, robs novels of their integrity.

“Gods” repeatedly subverts our desire for closure ― refusing to become what a confused Lisa increasingly wants: a “dog-eared, familiar book, something she could clutch in her hand” during her “terrible journey.”

Rather than looking for easy answers, Kunzru suggests, we should read instead for the questions ― remembering that when you travel in the desert, what looks like an oasis is usually just a mirage. (MCT)