Hamilton Cain (Author, This Boy’s Faith: Notes From a Southern Baptist Upbringing), ‘Zero at the Bone’ Review: Writing Against Darkness (reviewing Christian Wiman (Yale Divinity School), Zero at the Bone: 50 Entries Against Despair (2023)):
The challenge of measuring the commands of religious belief against the unavoidable state of mortality and suffering goes back at least as far as Job. For years the Yale theologian and poet Christian Wiman has grappled with a cancer diagnosis and a difficult prognosis, white-knuckling through a rollercoaster of chemotherapy and pneumonias, turning to faith and family for anchorage, his notebook for emotional ballast. His medical travails are the backdrop to “Zero at the Bone: 50 Entries Against Despair,” an ardent if pious and uneven pastiche of personal anecdote, criticism, his own poetry and (many) quotes from other luminaries.
Mr. Wiman’s despair is existential, but writing, he hopes, may be the antidote. As he notes in a prologue, “I want to write a book true to the storm of forms and needs, the intuitions and impossibilities, that I feel myself to be.” And there’s the rub: The writer peers into a glass darkly, searching for God, but his own reflection stares back.
The zero in the title is oblivion, or, as Mr. Wiman describes it in one aside, “the death of all human endeavor . . . the Great No that nibbles at consciousness.” It’s this dread of death and the obliteration of consciousness that binds religions and ancestor worship across millennia. The subtitle underscores the book’s structure while also evoking Pablo Neruda’s “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair,” suggesting that Mr. Wiman’s literary pedigree will loom large. …
Like many theologians, Mr. Wiman shrugs off challenges raised by evolutionary biology. The section titled “This I Believe” elevates the writer’s investigations into God over the scientific method. His tone can grow defensive: “The idolatry of science that surrounds us now is a symptom of superstition and not, as the scientists argue, a remedy for it. The superstition involves math and matter rather than ghosts and gods.” The determination to render the scientific project—flawed at times but fundamentally devoted to testing hypotheses against reality—as a “superstition” casts a strangely false note here, one that doesn’t support the book’s ostensible goal to find remedies for despair.
Ultimately much of this book forms a kind of sermon, often leaning on platitudes and moments of droll self-regard. Mr. Wiman is closer to the Southern preachers of his childhood than he realizes. “Sometimes it seems there’s nothing left to read,” he opines. “Nothing new, I mean. In English, I mean, which is the only language I read well enough to read with my ear (that is to say, with my soul).” Throughout, “Zero at the Bone” parses its weighty issues with élan, but it never escapes its own self-importance, the gravity of the first-person pronoun. I’d welcome a memoir that brings Mr. Wiman’s musings back to earth, shifting from an elliptical voice to an intimate one, less theological posturing, more snakes and Texas scrub. And dentures.
New York Times Book Review: Hard Truths About Suffering, From a Writer Who’s Lived to Tell, by Alexandra Jacobs:
In “Zero at the Bone,” Christian Wiman offers a welcome tonic: poetic and philosophical reminders of how to get through troubling times. …
“One grows so tired, in American public life,” Christian Wiman writes with sudden invigoration, “of the certitudes and platitudes, the megaphone mouths and stadium praise, influencers and effluencers and the whole tsunami of slop that comes pouring into our lives like toxic sludge.”
Amen to that!
Forget about Ozempic for a sec. Against such sludge, Wiman’s new book, “Zero at the Bone,” is like one of those fancy juice cleanses of recent yore, intellectual edition: full of salubrious and often quite tough poetry, philosophy and theology broken down into digestible bits. …
[H]e could charm an atheist out of a tree, sharing in its entirety the Canadian poet Anne Carson’s “God’s Justice,” about the Divinity’s distracting project of creating a dragonfly “with turquoise dots all down its back like Lauren Bacall.”
“One day God loses himself designing a dragonfly,” Wiman notes dryly in his breakdown of the poem, likening it to the Book of Job. “The next day, who knows, he might have become equally involved in the design of a cancer cell.” …
For a Christian, Wiman can be delightfully venomous himself, hissing about a pretentious-sounding Chicago restaurant, “aggressively velvet, waiters with the faces of fruit bats, a kind of blood pudding of ‘privilege,’” and the board member who drunkenly calls Lucille Clifton “Louise.” He admits frustration with religion, “not simply the institutional manifestations, which even a saint could hate, but sometimes, too many times, all of it, the very meat of it, the whole goddamned shebang.”
I am quoting too copiously — perhaps the practice is contagious — from a profane, irreverent, freewheeling and necessary book. Readers of whatever creed will be jolted to lift their heads from their screens and turn them to the unfathomable heavens.
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