If you’ve already read Rebecca Bradley’s fine review and recommendation of Imaginary Friends, by Alison Lurie (1967) and you were persuaded thereby, feel free to just skip this post. If you haven’t read it, though, go read it. Seriously, go read it right now. It’s okay if you don’t come back.
. . .
Thanks for coming back. As a reward, I’d like to whet your literary appetite even further. Here is a sample in which the narrator describes the emergent religious movement that he has come to study:
The Seekers’ theology was a mixture of Calvinism, Christian Science, spiritualism, and straight science-fiction. They believed that the Bible was divinely inspired; every word of it was true, in a symbolic sense. God the Father and God the Son were prayed and sung to at every meeting, but the important member of the Trinity for them was the third one. The Holy Spirit, or the Spirit of Light and Power, or simply Spiritual Light, was everywhere, around us and inside of us and permeating all material things: this table, that chair, your hat, and my overcoat; so that sometimes it seemed as if the Novars’ parlor was full of invisible doves.
He goes on:
Truth Seeking was a kind of do-it-yourself religion: each member of the group added something to it, or stressed the aspects that suited them most. Milly Munger and Catherine Vanting were always talking about the development of other souls who has passed over, mainly their relativels. Peggy Vonn kep trying to fit the standard Christian cast into the scheme–the Virgin Mary, she felt, was an important astral influence. Rufus Bell, the other Sophis college student, was more interested in super-mental powers and space-warp. . . . Verena, or rather Ro, accepted everyone’s contributions to the system impartially; so that usually as soon as one Seeker found a Truth, the whole group began to believe in it. The result was a communal hodge-podge of logical impossibilities.
Bascially, this book is about what happens when two scientists lose their objectivity while immersing themselves in a crazy mish-mash of basically every anti-skeptical idea that you can hope to shake a stick at. Flying saucers, cosmic messiahs, spirit guides, automatic writing, cosmic vibrations, loads of proto-Chopra woo, it’s all in there. I haven’t seen this much crazy in one place since my last visit to a psychic fair.
