From the author of the New York Times bestseller A Friend of the Family comes a deeply human story of the consuming nature of grief, our desperate search for meaning, and the salvation that only love has to offer.
Biology professor Andy Waite is finally beginning to pick up the pieces years after a drunk driver killed his wife. Between finishing his research and taking care of his young daughters, he has reasons to get through the day, and most days he does without falling apart. That is, until a young female student enters his life and turns it upside down.
Melissa Potter is a passionate evangelist hoping to write the definitive paper about Creationism. She makes Andy’s Darwinian certainty—and his grief—a personal challenge. As she chips away at his committed atheism, he begins to realize the emptiness that he’s been living with for too long. But when the relationship turns romantic, the boundaries he’s worked so hard to maintain—personally and professionally—start to blur, and soon it’s unclear what kind of deliverance he really needs.
Release date:
September 3, 2013
Publisher:
Algonquin Books
Print pages:
352
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I grew up in a family that was Jewish by tradition, not by faith. We celebrated the holidays, ate the foods, murmured the prayers, but we did so in order to participate in a community rather than to sanctify God. We did these things, that is to say, because our grandparents and great-grandparents had done them. We did them because so many people over the generations had tried to stop us from doing them. We did them out of stubbornness and comfort and love. But we didn’t do them because we believed in a supernatural deity. In fact, if you’d asked us what we thought about the creation of the universe or the genesis of human morality or the afterlife, what would we have said? Probably nothing—or maybe something pseudoscientific or sarcastic. Then we would have changed the subject.
My atheism has never felt false to me, although at times I’ve wished it weren’t so. After my grandmother was killed by a speeding car, I longed to imagine her in heaven; I couldn’t do it. When my son was born with assorted birth defects, I yearned for the belief necessary to pray for his health—but, again, I found it impossible. It was just me and my husband and the baby in the NICU, with no angels watching over us, nothing but chance determining our son’s fate. This truth felt chilly but also rational, and reason has been the guiding principle of my life, even more so than love, or belief in myself.
Yet I’ve never been particularly strident about or proud of my atheism, nor have I ever felt that others’ belief threatens my nonbelief. In fact, I admire believers for their pure trust, for the imagination they have that encompasses the infinite. I don’t have this sort of imagination, but I am lucky to be dear friends with people who do. Belief in a supernatural God orders their world the way that belief in empirical evidence orders mine. They do not claim to be better or smarter than I am, nor is their place in the world made less secure by the fact that I am part of it. We are friends, after all. And if I disagree with them about the age of the universe or whether or not Jesus was God made flesh, this disagreement doesn’t interrupt our pleasant monthly dinners, or our kids gleefully beating the stuffing out of each other on the rec room floor.
It’s fascinating and saddening to me, this strange American split between believers and nonbelievers, as though we needed one more reason to stay separate from one another. Or maybe the split isn’t so American—for as I write, people around the world are being harassed and even killed for their own deepest truths. Why should Americans be any better? But then again— shouldn’t we be? Or shouldn’t we try?
I was motivated to write my new novel, The Explanation for Everything, after reading about the school board members in Dover, Pennsylvania, who tried to insert intelligent design (that is, the idea that a supernatural entity “designed” all living things) into their high school science curriculum. A lawsuit ensued, and the defendants—school board members who shared a profound, evangelical faith—were humiliated in court. The judge’s decision said, in part, that intelligent design “violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation.” Atheists around the world, who had been watching this trial with the avidity of whale-watchers on a three-hour tour, cheered like an orca had just breached over the boat. The defendants, meanwhile, went on to lose their posts and, in several instances, their health and public standing.
I agree with the judge’s verdict entirely, yet I couldn’t help but feel somehow saddened by the spectacle that assailed the defendants. For while it’s true that intelligent design isn’t science, and that it has no place in the public school science curriculum, I feel certain these school board members were animated by a true sense of faith, of wanting to share their faith—that they weren’t out to trick or undermine as much as they were out to share the truth that was most important to them. I disagree entirely with what they hoped to do, but my novelist’s empathy couldn’t help imagining their altruistic motivations, and wanting to write about them.
I wrote this book, then, because I’m certain we all need different things to get through every day: some of us need God and some of us need to share God; some of us need only the ground beneath our feet. I need a glass of wine and my husband and (healthy) son, good books and my students and friends. But The Explanation for Everything comes from the urge to investigate the way these differing needs separate us, and the way the human compulsion for understanding can sometimes bring us back together.
Questions for Discussion
1. In The Explanation for Everything, Andy Waite is a confirmed atheist who doesn’t believe in the supernatural, yet he’s convinced he’s being trailed by his wife’s ghost. To what extent are these contradictory beliefs shaped by grief? To what extent do we all live with contradictions about our faith?
2. Do you think Andy is a good professor? Why or why not?
3. Andy keeps asking himself, and anyone else who will listen, whether God is a figure of mercy or justice—he doesn’t believe God can be both. Are mercy and justice opposing qualities? How do they work to oppose each other in our culture?
4. Why do you think Melissa Potter was so invested in changing Andy’s mind about religion? Were her intentions fueled by faith, romantic interest, or a genuine interest in his well-being?
5. Books and letters play an important role in this novel. Why do you think Andy took such solace in the opposing works of Hank Rosenblum and Pastor Cling? Are those works really so oppositional?
6. Throughout the novel, Andy finds purpose in being angry, but he also seems tired of being angry. In what ways does he go about finding peace? What other avenues toward peace do Sheila, Rosenblum, Melissa, and his daughters offer him?
7. At different points in the book, Lionel Shell finds himself equally zealous about creationism and atheism. Why might a person believe so passionately in both sides of the argument? How are both ideologies a kind of faith?
8. Anita Lim is destroyed, in part, by turning from science to faith. Do you think her acceptance of a loving God was responsible for her demise? If not, then what was responsible?
9. Andy’s daughter Belle longs to be baptized. What do you think this religious ritual means to her? What does it mean to Andy to witness her baptism?
10. The deeper Andy investigates God, the less charitable his treatment of his neighbor, Sheila. In the end, is it the atheist, Rosenblum, who reminds Andy of his responsibility to his fellow man? Why do you think Andy treated Sheila so shabbily?
11. How does Andy’s trip to Florida affect his feelings about his work?
12. Throughout the novel, Andy finds solace in his daughters, in how much he loves them and how much they remind him of Lou. How does parenthood provide Andy reasons to pursue his research, his letters to McGee, and his own isolation?
13. Why do you think Rosenblum wrote to Andy toward the end of his life?
14. What are the different ways that Darwin and Darwinian theory get used throughout the novel?
15. The Explanation for Everything is a book about faith and evolutionary theory that doesn’t take sides. In the real world, is it possible not to take sides on this debate? What are the consequences of accepting both possibilities?
Other Algonquin Readers Round Table Novels
A Friend of the Family, a novel by Lauren Grodstein
Pete Dizinoff has a thriving medical practice in suburban New Jersey, a devoted wife, a network of close friends, an impressive house, and a son, Alec, now nineteen, on whom he’s pinned all his hopes. But Pete never counted on Laura, his best friend’s daughter, setting her sights on his only son. Lauren Grodstein’s riveting novel charts a father’s fall from grace as he struggles to save his family, his reputation, and himself.
“Suspense worthy of Hitchcock . . . [Grodstein] is a terrific storyteller.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A gripping portrayal of a suburban family in free-fall.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune
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The Art Forger, a novel by B. A. Shapiro
In this New York Times bestseller about art, authenticity, love, and betrayal, a long-missing Degas painting—stolen during the still-unsolved heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—is delivered to the studio of a young artist who has entered into a Faustian bargain with a powerful gallery owner.
“[A] highly entertaining literary thriller about fine art and foolish choices.” —Parade
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The Watery Part of the World, a novel by Michael Parker
This vast and haunting novel spans more than a century of liaisons that develop on a tiny windblown island battered by storms and cut off from the world—beginning in 1813 with the disappearance of a ship off the North Carolina coast and ending 150 years later when the last three inhabitants are forced to abandon their beloved, beautiful island.
“A lush feat of historical speculation . . . A vivid tale about the tenacity of habit and the odd relationships that form in very small, difficult places.” —The Washington Post
AN ALGONQUIN READERS ROUND TABLE EDITION WITH READING GROUP GUIDE AND OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES • FICTION • ISBN 978-1-61620-143-2
Heading Out to Wonderful, a novel by Robert Goolrick
In the summer of 1948, a handsome, charismatic stranger shows up in the sleepy town of Brownsburg, Virginia. All he has with him are two suitcases: one contains his few possessions, including a fine set of butcher knives; the other is full of money. From the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling novel A Reliable Wife comes a heart-stopping story of love gone terribly wrong.
“A suspenseful tale of obsessive love.” —People
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When She Woke, a novel by Hillary Jordan
Bellwether Prize winner Hillary Jordan’s provocative novel is the fiercely imagined story of a woman struggling to navigate an America of a not-too-distant future, where the line between church and state has been eradicated, and a terrifying new way of delivering justice has been introduced.
“Chillingly credible . . . Holds its own alongside the dark inventions of Margaret Atwood and Ray Bradbury.” —The New York Times Book Review
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Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions, by Daniel Wallace
This hilarious and wrenching, tender and outrageous, novel about a young man who wants desperately to know the truth about his elusive father—an indefatigable teller of tall tales—has been turned into a major motion picture and a Broadway musical.
“A charming whopper of a tale.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune
“A comic novel about death, about the mysteries of parents and the redemptive power of storytelling.” —USA Today
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Wolf Whistle, a novel by Lewis Nordan
When Lewis Nordan unleashed his extraordinary writing powers on the events surrounding the killing of Emmett Till and the subsequent trial during which his killers were acquitted by an all-white jury, the result was epic: profoundly sad, manically comic, and stunningly powerful.
“Wolf Whistle is an immense and wall-shattering display of talent.” —Randall Kenan, The Nation
“An illuminating, even uplifting, achievement . . . Flat-out wonderful.” —The Washington Post Book World
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Gap Creek, a novel by Robert Morgan
An Oprah Book Club Selection in hardcover, this timeless story chronicles the struggles, disappointments, and triumphs of Julie and Hank, newlyweds facing the complexities of marriage and a changing world in the Appalachian wilderness at the end of the nineteenth century.
“[Morgan’s] stripped-down and almost primitive sentences burn with the raw, lonesome pathos of Hank Williams’s best songs.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Gripping storytelling, indelible sense of time and place . . . Morgan turns the stories of prosaic lives into page-turners.” —The Raleigh News and Observer
Winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award
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The Truest Pleasure, a novel by Robert Morgan
Tom wants land to call his own; Ginny knows she can’t manage her aging father’s farm by herself. Their marriage, born out of necessity and plagued by their dueling obsessions, is at once highly frustrating and deeply gratifying to them both. A story as old, as true, and as beautiful as the hills in which it unfolds.
“Marvelously vivid imagery . . . A quietly audacious book.” — The New York Times Book Review
“Morgan’s simple, eloquent language grounds the story in a tough farm life, his language pulses with poetry.” — The Washington Post Book World
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Running the Rift, a novel by Naomi Benaron
A stunning award-winning novel that—through the eyes of one unforgettable boy—explores a country’s unraveling, its tentative new beginning, and the love that binds its people together. The story follows the life and progress of Jean Patrick Nkuba, a young runner who dreams of becoming Rwanda’s first Olympic track medalist.
“Benaron writes like Jean Patrick runs, with the heart of a lion.” — The Dallas Morning News
“A culturally rich and unflinching story of resilience and resistance.” —Chicago Tribune, Editor’s Choice
“Audacious and compelling . . . An authentic and richly textured portrait of African life.” —The Washington Post
Winner of the Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction
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A Reliable Wife, a novel by Robert Goolrick
Rural Wisconsin, 1907. In the bitter cold, Ralph Truitt stands alone on a train platform anxiously awaiting the arrival of the woman who answered his newspaper ad for “a reliable wife.” The woman who arrives is not the one he expects in this New York Times #1 bestseller about love and madness, longing and murder.
“[A] chillingly engrossing plot . . . Good to the riveting end.” — USA Today
“Deliciously wicked and tense . . . Intoxicating.” — The Washington Post
“A rousing historical potboiler.” —The Boston Globe
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West of Here, a novel by Jonathan Evison
Spanning more than a hundred years—from the ragged mudflats of a belching and bawdy Western frontier in the 1890s to the rusting remains of a strip-mall cornucopia in 2006—West of Here chronicles the life of one small town. It’s a saga of destiny and greed, adventure and passion, hope and hilarity, that turns America’s history into myth and myth into a nation’s shared experience.
“[A] booming, bighearted epic.” —Vanity Fair
“[A] voracious story . . . Brisk, often comic, always deeply sympathetic.” —The Washington Post
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Praise for The Explanation for Everything
“[Grodstein has] fashioned in her smart, assured third novel, The Explanation for Everything . . . a gripping tale of a biologist who finds himself approaching midlife and suddenly finding faith . . . Grodstein’s real gift is her emotional precision . . . Finding or losing God proves to be an equally destabilizing tectonic shift, and this novel is full of them . . . Their cumulative force will leave you happily unsteady, and moved.” —The Washington Post
“Harnessing the tension between our spiritual and rational instincts, Grodstein explores the dangers of certitude, the power of conviction, and the spiritual quality of love and loss, the way those feelings take us to the very brink of being, of questioning who we are and what we believe.” —Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise
“Her narrative sparkles with irony and wry observation . . . Grodstein’s portrait of Andy is spot-on, as is that of the evangelical student, Sheila, Rosenblum and the minor characters. A rumination on love and loss, faith in reason and faith in the divine.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Very smart and touching and unexpected.” —Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers and Little Children
“Lauren Grodstein proves herself a master storyteller.”
—Ben Schrank, author of Love Is a Canoe
“In The Explanation for Everything Lauren Grodstein creates a fiercely intelligent story about the permeable line between faith and doubt.” —Bookbrowse.com’s Editor’s Choice
“Lauren Grodstein’s smart, compassionate novel The Explanation for Everything offers a welcome respite for anyone seeking fresh paths over this well-trodden ground . . . [Grodstein] understands that, for many believers, faith is grounded in something much more subtle and profound than a carefully constructed theology. In exploring the conflict between faith and science in a story that's as much about the mysteries of the human heart as it is about religion or evolution, she shows how art can be a surer road to truth than even the most intellectually elegant ideology.” —Shelf Awareness
“Why do any of us act the way we do? Is it our beliefs or our biology that shapes us? Lauren Grodstein considers this eternal question through the story of Andrew Waite, scientist, father, widower, struggling to raise two daughters, living with the ghost of his wife, facing a test of his faith in science. There are no easy answers here, just the honest complexity of human beings trying their best to be good people. The Explanation for Everything is moving, beautiful, and wonderfully funny.” —Victor LaValle, author of The Devil in Silver
“The Explanation for Everything is a thoughtfully told and unforgettable tale of faith and forgiveness.” —Largehearted Boy
“Delightful and memorable . . . Lauren Grodstein tackles these issues with grace and flair…changes in belief, no matter how subtle, can be earthshaking. And can be, as in this novel, the basis for a very fine and engaging story.” —Hudson Valley News
Praise for A Friend of the Family
“Stunning . . . An unqualified success . . . Grodstein’s sentences are finely made and precisely fitted to one another and her story . . . She has written a novel that will leave her reader sitting up, sifting the evidence in the dead of night.” —The Boston Globe
“A gripping novel . . . Told with great understanding and sensitivity, gripping readers so that they will find the book hard to put down.” —Chicago Tribune
“Horrifyingly plausible and deeply poignant . . . Will leave you shaken and chastened—and grateful for the warning.” —The Washington Post Book World
“What a wonderful and compelling read. This book is full of insights and honesty; you will have a hard time putting it down . . . Grodstein’s skills at storytelling are unwavering.” —Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge
“A persuasive indictment of a certain kind of privileged narrow-mindedness . . . In the best tradition of parenting gone catastrophically awry.” —O: The Oprah Magazine
“Involving at every level: character, plot, language. One of the more complicated portraits of a father’s love for his son we’ve ever read . . . Highly recommended.” —McSweeney’s
“Suspense worthy of Hitchcock . . . This is less a novel about one imperfect citizen than a sharp account of the status-
driven suburban culture that turned him into a monster of conformity.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Grodstein’s harsh, honest prose makes this haunting tale worthwhile.” —People
“Spot-on in its depiction of affection and jealousy among longtime friends; boozy suburban bashes; unrequited love; and adjusting to middle age.” —USA Today
“A gripping portrayal of a suburban family in free-fall . . . The structure of compromise and principle supporting a happy family is precariously perched to begin with, and in Grodstein’s skilled hands love is an unstable element.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“In her wonderful second novel, Grodstein traces a suburban crisis and gives especially perceptive attention to the father-son bond . . . An astute dissector of male aspiration, Grodstein brings great insight into a father’s protective urge for his son in this gripping portrait of an American family in crisis.” —San Francisco Examiner
ONE
The first time Andy met Louisa, she was covered in blood. He was a bit bloodied himself, having just suffered a minor bicycle accident where Nassau intersects with Mercer and nobody can see himself coming or going. It was a Sunday morning in 1994, and Andy was wearing the ridiculous clothing he’d let himself get talked into by the cute salesgirl at Kopp’s, purple spandex shorts—“junk-huggers!” Rosenblum hooted—and a black and silver nylon shirt. Anyway, he’d been daydreaming, yes, but he was reflexively careful at that intersection. And then an Audi out of nowhere, some cursing, an unnecessary ambulance, and now here he was, cradling what was almost certainly a broken wrist and thinking about his dissertation and the way the Mercer County emergency room smelled like urine and paint. The orange plastic chair was hard under his butt; his bicycle-friendly spandex shorts offered no padding whatsoever.
Then, as CNN began to rotate through yet another story on O.J. Simpson, this girl sat down next to him, hair trailing down her shoulders and around her face, the most magnificent sample of human hair he’d ever seen. Brown and gold streaks and some blond in there too, curls and waves, like in a magazine. The face wasn’t bad either, as far as he could tell from profile: a nice curve of the cheek, a slightly oversized, bumpy nose, a full mouth. But it was that hair he couldn’t stop looking at. He had the absurd compulsion to stick his hands in it, and was grateful to his probably broken wrist for stopping what would have otherwise been a sure breach of etiquette.
She was not looking at him. Her left hand was wrapped in red-stained gauze, and she had blood on her white T-shirt, and blood on her jeans.
“What are you here for?” he asked. The question was absurd, but he felt that if he talked to her, he would almost certainly not stick his good . . .
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