The Devil and Daniel Silverman - Softcover

Roszak, Theodore

3.42

103 ratings by Goodreads

9780967952079: The Devil and Daniel Silverman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0967952077 ISBN 13: 9780967952079

Publisher: Leapfrog Press, 2003

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Danny Silverman’s first novel reached #10 on the New York Times best-seller list, but that was 20 years ago. Now middle-aged, he and his partner, Martin, an African-American actor, are getting by on the residuals from Martin’s cancelled TV cop series when Danny gets an offer he can’t refuse: a speaking gig in a Minnesota bible college that will net him a small fortune. Why me? Silverman wonders, but he’ll take the money and run. What can happen? Only a record-breaking snowstorm that traps him under the same roof as the evangelical Christian faculty who see this Jewish homosexual writer from San Francisco as the incarnation of the anti-Christ. Forced to defend all he believes in—sexual equality, human rights, same-sex marriage; dancing! vodka! coffee!—Silverman finds himself on the front lines of the culture wars dividing the nation today.

Best known as a social historian, Theodore Roszak is also the author of cult-status novels such as Flicker, a Hollywood horror satire, and The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, a sensual retelling of the gothic classic. Now Roszak brings us a hilarious novel of politics and ideas in which the battle for the moral heart of America is waged between a college full of scripture-spouting fundamentalists and one gay humanist who thinks they’re full of crap.

Theodore Roszak lives in Berkeley, where he is a professor of history at California State University, Hayward. The author of 18 books, including the international bestseller The Making of a Counter Culture, he has twice been nominated for the National Book Award. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s. The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein (Random House) received The James Tiptree Award for "literature that expands our understanding of gender."

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From Publishers Weekly:

This story of a gay Jewish novelist's trip from San Francisco to a small religious college in the Midwest is an uneven, fitfully entertaining satire. Roszak, a social historian (The Making of a Counter Culture) and novelist (Flicker), begins with some witty jabs at the publishing industry. Daniel Silverman is a writer whose last success was nearly 20 years ago, when Analyzing Anna ("solid middle-brow exercises in mordant but good-humored social satire") spent one week at number 10 on the New York Times bestseller list. Now his job teaching university extension courses isn't paying the bills, and his agent has long since dumped him. When Minnesota's Faith College invites him to speak on humanism, he can hardly refuse-they're offering $12,000. When he arrives, he finds that the faculty members believe, among other things, that homosexuals are unclean and humanists are going to hell. To make matters worse, he is trapped by a ferocious blizzard for several days. At this point, the book becomes bogged down in broad, predictable sendups of the American religious right. Silverman has heated arguments with his bigoted hosts, who talk about "the nearly monopolistic influence your people hold over the mass media" and insist that evidence for the Holocaust is "exaggerated." Roszak does some damage control by turning to farce, as a liquor-soaked Silverman begins to suspect that his hosts are planning to kill him before the end of the storm. But the novel's intermittent pleasures are weighed down by the clumsy social critique.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

What happens when worlds collide? Especially when a "secular humanist" is stranded in a group of Far Right Christian evangelicals? Roszak confronts these issues in his new novel. Daniel Silverman is a once successful--now failing--writer, gay, a secular Jew, and an overall ornery person. Living in San Francisco, he is booked as a speaker at a tiny Christian college in northern Minnesota, and he doesn't know why. He hasn't had work or speaking engagements in years. Once he arrives, to give a lecture on "Religious Humanism," he is immediately confronted with a cloistered community of like-minded Christians who doubt everything Silverman says, and he ends up defending his very way of life--much of which he privately despises. Trapped on campus in a blizzard, Silverman himself eventually becomes a Christ figure--persecuted, almost unto death, by righteous "believers" who can't stand his tolerance. Despite the smug viewpoints Roszak puts into Silverman's mouth and the unbearable characters he creates the evangelicals to be, he tells a good story about believing in yourself and your lifestyle. Michael Spinella
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