As he did with Creator and Satan's Psychotherapy and Cure, Jeremy Leven has once again created pure magic with this hilarious, moving, and thought-provoking tale of a man who abandons all to search for Perfect Love. And what could be more perfect to love than the Messiah, who now reappears in the prophesied Second Coming as a knockout young female. Declared to be the God of All Gods, She (her name is, in fact, She) beckons our protagonist, the somewhat bewildered Max Pincus, on a journey which is part Canterbury Tales and part, it becomes increasingly evident, a tongue-in-cheek reworking of the New Testament, from virgin birth to Sermon on the Mount, to... well that would give away what Leven has carefully crafted in this extraordinary tale.
Ultimately a love-story, along Pincus's journey to find the new young female Savior, he finds himself attracting a growing cast of self-proclaimed apostles (who, it appears, are neither called nor chosen, but don't especially care), including Rosalie (questionably a - not the - Virgin Mother), Theo Wainwright (an antique dealer who is seeking a satisfactory explanation for the recent passing of his wife of many decades), Sister Gloria Gloria (who keeps the assembly on the most devout spiritual path), Florence (the owner of a New England Bed and breakfast who longs for a life that can be called special), her husband, Sparky (a romantic without the normal bounds one might expect with this designation), his brother, Elliott (along with Sparky, the inventor of the gigantic - and perhaps lethal - Singing Machine, a device with a will of its own and a continually morphing and haunting song which leads all who join Pincus to seek out the new Savior to explain the song's true meaning, dragging the Singing Machine along with them as they go), Meyer Steinmeyer (a philosopher seeking to define with great precision the exact moment a girl becomes a woman and whose nationality and accent seems to change depending on his mood and the weather), and The Thaumaturge (the father of the present Virgin Mother, who may or may not have been responsible for the possibly immaculate conception and who is a fervent anti-synoptic, having an extensive list of reasons why the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are not to be taken seriously).
But it is the budding romance between the Savior and Max Pincus which drives the story, as the so-called apostles attempt to determine whether She is, in fact, the Savior, in which case they have strong reservations about Pincus dating her.
At the end, Leven ingeniously leaves us with a tale which puts us in the midst of what might have been occurring had we been among the original apostles as they encountered the Messiah, and he suggests a world which might have been had the true intentions of the Messiah been realized. It is a comedy of the highest order.
