![]() ![]() ![]() Will, a former evangelical Christian, remembers standing at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf with his fellow-believers after a day of preaching, holding hands and “calling out in tongues.” For him, the memory of that day is ecstatic, and the loss of that faith, that joy, is a devastation. When an imaginary character cares most deeply about a god who seems equally imaginary, the spell can weaken a reader may impatiently wonder when the character will wise up and throw off these phantasmal chains. The characters in fiction may be invented, but the concerns and the passions that propel them-love, ambition, anger, fear, curiosity, desire, loneliness-are ones that everyone shares. Reading a novel requires, if not outright belief, the willing suspension of its opposite. In fiction, there’s a corollary: to the nonbelieving reader, a character’s religious fervor can be a hindrance. ![]() “People with no experience of God tend to think that leaving the faith would be a liberation, a flight from guilt, rules,” observes Will Kendall, one of the three central characters in “ The Incendiaries,” R. ![]()
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