Har-har From Heaven
What if God decided to destroy mankind so that he could open a fusion restaurant instead? In his funny and profound new novel, 20-something literary wunderkind Simon Rich imagines just such a scenario.
Anne Sexton, 05 Oct 2012
Simon Rich is a funny man. Indeed, he is, as the expression goes, funny ha ha, and funny peculiar. Rich is a skinny, intellectual New Yorker with a Jewish background who talks at a furious pace while inhaling coffee – if you put a character like this in a film, people would accuse you of lazy ethnic stereotyping.
He is also something of a prodigy. Rich is just 27 and in that short time he has managed to graduate from Harvard, work on Saturday Night Live – one of the youngest writers to do so – and author two very funny novels. It’s the second of these, What In God’s Name, that he’s in Dublin to talk about.
What In God’s Name imagines heaven as a not very efficient corporation staffed by desk-bound angels with a CEO who has long lost interest in humanity’s troubles. God decides to destroy the world to follow his dream of opening an American-Asian fusion restaurant and only two angels, Craig and Eliza, want to save us. They make a bet with God and the world’s fate depends on whether or not they can get two rather unpromising humans to fall in love.
The novel may be laugh-out-loud funny, but its premises are somewhat bleak. This, says Rich, was not what he intended.
“I was trying to write the most hopeful, optimistic book I could, I was trying to write a love story really, a romantic comedy. At the same time I have a very nihilistic view of the world and I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason. Most things that happen are really random and horrible and serve no purpose whatsoever. Given what I know to be true, how could I create a system where hope is still possible? That was sort of the starting point.”
While most of the angels – former humans themselves – are uninterested in people, Craig, an angel in the Department of Miracles, wonders about the unintended consequences of his work.
“I tried to think about it logically. If you stop the rain for someone, it’s bad for the farmer down the road. Do you end up making things worse?”
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