The World Is a Narrow Bridge
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
"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." --Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
From the author of Mr. Eternity, a darkly comic road novel about a millennial couple facing the ultimate question: how to live and love in an age of catastrophe.
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. He also wants her to manage his social media presence.
Yahweh sends the two on a wild road trip across the country, making incomprehensible demands and mandating arcane rituals as they go. He gives them a hundred million dollars, but he asks them to use it to build a temple on top of a landfill. He forces them to endure a period of Biblical wandering in the deserts of the southwest. Along the way they are continually mistaken for another couple, a pair of North Carolina society people, and find themselves attending increasingly bizarre events in their names. At odds with their mission but helpless to disobey, Murphy and Eva search their surroundings for signs of a future they can have faith in.
Through wry observations about the biggest things--cosmology and theology--and the smallest things--the joys and irritations of daily life--Thier questions the mysterious forces that shape our fates, and wonders how much free will we really have. Equal parts hilarious and poignant, The World Is a Narrow Bridge asks: What kind of hope can we pass on to the next generation in a frightening but beautiful world?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thier (Mr. Eternity) again tackles fundamental human questions in this latter-day allegory of biblical prophecy. Murphy and Eva ponder the question of whether to conceive a child in a country plagued by toxic politics and a world threatened with environmental disaster and on their tenuous freelance salaries, to boot. Devoted secular humanists, the young couple are more than a little bemused when Yahweh appears to Eva and demands that she testify about his existence. Yahweh's insistence, however, may be just the kick in the pants they need, and soon they shake off their Miami torpor, quit their jobs, and travel the country. Eva's initial hesitation gives way to full-on religious ecstasy prompted in no small part by the $100 million Yahweh deposits in their checking account. The novel's more pointedly comic first half, filled with winking commentaries on contemporary foibles (the couple grows collards in the back seat rather than stoop to eating road food), gives way to a broader canvas that is both more cynical and, in its final pages, resignedly hopeful. Though attempts to elevate the novel above the satirical don't always hit the mark, Thier gives readers plenty to ponder, from the petulance and cruelty of the Old Testament God to the wisdom or futility of accepting and even loving a permanently imperfect world.
