A review of The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ by Andrew Klavan
Leave it to Andrew Klavan, a best-selling author of mystery and suspense novels, to write a spiritual memoir that also manages to be a page-turner. Most readers don’t have itchy trigger fingers for Christian-conversion sagas; you either fire on that frequency or you don’t. But everyone likes a good story, and The Great Good Thing is as dramatic as any tale involving Klavan’s many tough-guy protagonists. In 14 exquisitely wrought chapters, he describes how, raised as a Jew in Great Neck, Long Island, he wound up, at 50, being baptized in a Manhattan church, a believer in Christ.
He grew up “Jew-ish,” as he calls it, the child of secular parents who kept the faith at a safe distance. His mother was repulsed by the rituals of traditional Judaism; she refused the mikvah, the ritual bath given to Jewish brides, and her shame for Jewishness “must have colored everything,” Klavan thinks. Klavan’s father, Gene, cohosted a popular New York morning-radio show. Intense, driven, and suspicious, the father “conceived a special animosity” for Andrew that the son would never fully understand. Their relationship was “one long, furious firefight.”
Whatever their conflicts with Judaism, Klavan’s parents certainly never wanted him to leave the faith—such as theirs was—and become, of all things, a Christian. His road to revelation is long and painful, suffused with a search for meaning, with bouts of depression and rage and thoughts of suicide, but tied together from the beginning by a unifying thread: narrative. Stories run in Klavan’s blood from the beginning. He spins elaborate fantasies throughout his childhood, becoming so “addicted to dreams” that, at age eight, concerned that he is not really seeing the world around him, he disciplines himself to block out his daydreams and take note of the physical world. He succeeds but realizes that trees and sky mean little of themselves; only the mind can give them value.
Read the entire piece here at The American Conservative
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Paul Beston is managing editor of City Journal.
This piece originally appeared in The American Conservative