God's Wife

Amanda Michalopoulou
2014
Rating: 7

This was my first novel by a Greek author, and it’s quite good, periodically brilliant. It’s a beautiful premise for a novel, a mostly epistolary first person tale about a 17 year old girl with some masochistic tendencies who marries God, and about how their marriage unfolds, fluctuating between adoration, distrust, and rebellion.

At points the novel, which I would characterize as magical realism, felt like Nobel prize caliber writing, although these moments were fleeting. Through the first two-thirds of the novel I felt like it might rank among my top 10 favorite novels. It cracked the top 20 but not the top 10.

Along the way there are a number of rich insights into Creation, the nature of love and faith, the nature of writing, and what it means to write fiction. The significance and implications of writing, and more specifically what it means for women, is one of the novel’s main themes. One of the accomplishments of God’s Wife is how it manages to explore philosophical ideas and themes without being wooden or bombastic.

It’s almost always the case with any decent novel that a second reading brings you closer to a truer understanding of what the book is about, how it works, what it’s trying to say. That feels like it’s even moreso true with God’s Wife. I read it for a book club, and this novel in particular would be a great one to discuss with other people, owing to certain complexities and ambiguities.

So, why did it not crack the top 10? I would be hard-pressed to identify any legitimate grips I had with the novel, but the closest thing I’d have to a complaint about it is that … to me it felt like it wanted to be more of an epic. It’s a very short novel, 144 pages, and maybe this is a compliment rather than a complaint, but I wanted to scope of the story to be bigger. There are only two characters of any significance in the story, the narrator wife and God.

The book has a plot, but I would not call it a plot driven book. The plot such as it is is somewhat minimal. It’s an effective plot and I’m sure that Michalopoulous structured it carefully, and that it is a shorter novel because she felt that that was the best way to tell the story, but for that reason, to me, the book feels somewhat incomplete. Not fully realized. In particular, the writing around the Creation was interesting, but I felt that she could have leaned much more heavily into this.

The only other minor gripe is that, while ambiguity is a tool that is used intentionally to tell the story, there were a few passages, particularly in the final 20 pages of the book where it felt like “complexity” and “ambiguity” about the relationship degenerated into something of a mish-mash that did not service the telling of the story or the development of the character. There are pages where the wife has opposing or conflicting feelings about God every other paragraph which for me induced a bit of a whiplash sensation.

It is bringing to mind Mariette in Ecstacy by Ron Hanson, which if I recall explores similar themes and subject matter, I will have to take a look at that one too.

All of that said, however, this was a great book, I recommend it.