By Jennifer Howard

The best academic satire you are likely to read this year is not strictly an academic satire at all. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's new novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, published by Pantheon this month, explores the circuitous paths people travel in search of belief. Most of the truth seekers in Ms. Goldstein's novel have academic affiliations, some more illustrious than others, and on one very funny level the novel is a field guide to greater and lesser forms of academic life.

I called up Ms. Goldstein to talk about 36 Arguments, academic satire, and novels of ideas. She was at home in Cambridge, Mass., where she lives with her husband, the Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. This is a good time to mention that Ms. Goldstein is a Princeton-trained analytic philosopher, an expert on Spinoza who has taught philosophy and writing at Barnard, Columbia, Tufts, and her graduate alma mater, among other places. Her previous novels include The Mind-Body Problem (Random House, 1993) and Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000). Her accolades include one of the MacArthur Foundation's so-called genius awards.

Her new novel's subtitle, A Work of Fiction, gives you some idea of where Ms. Goldstein stands on the question of whether God exists. As a novelist, though, she's perhaps less interested in the answer than in who's doing the asking.

"Every piece of fiction I've written, they've all grown out of some philosophical issue I've been thinking about, and I start thinking about embedding them in a story," she says. Her characters do not embody ideas, they dig into them, argue over them. She is perfectly happy to have two characters spend most of a dinner scene exploring the spiritual and ethical ramifications of the quest to live for 500 years.

Ideas matter in Ms. Goldstein's novels, and that's the root of her particular brand of satire. It's born more of disappointment that deep thinkers can run so shallow than of Kingsley Amis-style wrath.

An evisceration of academic foibles, á la Amis's Lucky Jim, is not what she's aiming for. "There are barbs in some of my portrayals, maybe because I believe in this so much that I feel personally betrayed when I see ego taking over," she told me. "I don't think this is a pointless exercise, thinking for a living. I believe in it fervently."

Her satirical impulses fasten on what she calls a kind of "poignant absurdity" that sometimes besets intellectuals. "Even people who are thinking very big—their whole lives are devoted to intellectual pursuits—and are sometimes even heroic in their intellectual endeavors, can be extremely limited, clueless, pitiful," she said. "I never feel that I'm being completely satirical, although I know it can come off that way. There are sins of professional thinking, sins we can fall into as professional thinkers, but they're very poignant."

A Professor's Progress

Cass Seltzer, the hero of 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, shares Ms. Goldstein's belief that the life of the mind is a life worth living. The forty-something Cass is a professor at Frankfurter University, a middling institution of higher learning just down the road from the greener pastures of Harvard.

Cass might have gone on thinking his way through a life of comfortable obscurity. But life changes when his most recent book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, catches a zeitgeist wave, rides it onto The New York Times best-seller list, and lands its author the pop-culture title of the "atheist with a soul."

His surprise hit brings him other blessings (even Cass might use that word), such as a plum job offer from Harvard and the company of Lucinda Mandelbaum, a brainy bombshell whom Cass calls the Goddess of Game Theory. Unlike mathematically inclined Lucinda, Cass remains "knee-deep in the swampy humanities," but at least he's now got a high-powered agent helping him wade through the swamp: Sy Auerbach, who has "an agenda that goes beyond putting the 'antic' back in 'pedantic' and the 'earning' back in 'learning.'" It helps that Cass is decent, tall, and good-looking, with "the sweetest, most earnest smile this side of Oral Roberts University."

All of this is sketched out with a zest for the tics and hiccups of faculty life, the jockeying for status, the small slights and larger betrayals, the death-by-minutiae that is a faculty meeting. But Ms. Goldstein reserves her most devastating academic portraiture for Cass's mentor/persecutor, Jonas Elijah Klapper, the jowly, fleshy, egomaniacal Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature, and Values at Frankfurter. Any reader who has sat in on a seminar run by a quotation-spouting Academic Eminence will recognize Klapper's type. He delivers lectures "in the very voice of Western civilization." His courses have titles like "The Manic, the Mantic, and the Mimetic." He hates theory almost as much as he loves to quote at length from his admittedly prodigious memory. "There is only one theory," he intones, "and it is the theory you shall pull bloody from the afterbirth of your own self."

If Klapper has a religion, it's himself. "Goethe had settled for being a genius, the professor had whispered, and Cass's spine had tingled, as it always tingled when the professor's voice dropped down to a trembling hush, even when Cass had no idea what Professor Klapper meant, as he so often had no idea what Professor Klapper meant." Cass's ex-girlfriend Roz, a zesty anthropologist and seeker of eternal youth, calls the Extreme Distinguished Professor "the Klap."

Ms. Goldstein insists there is no single real-life model for Klapper—readers will undoubtedly supply their own—but she has seen the cults of personality that grow up around "these charismatic figures with their utterances," who speak "as though they're handing down the truth from on high." Even for Klapper, though, Ms. Goldstein reserves a hint of sympathy, a sense that his is a noble calling gone off the rails. Call it satire with a soul.