THE BOY WITHOUT A SOUL

Science and religious dogmatism clash in a novel about an impending American civil war.

Deaton’s work opens with 43-year-old hematologist Tom Tanner attending a church service at First Roman Baptist Church in Presterton, Mississippi, with his girlfriend, 32-year-old psychiatrist Leonora Blaine. He’s doing so not because he’s at all religious—in fact, he’s an atheist—but because he finds Leonora sexually alluring. She promises that the church’s leader, Pastor John Prester, is genuinely impressive, and as it turns out, the talented speaker does make an impression on Tanner. “I am here to tell you that the Old Testament is true!” Prester says. “It is the inerrant history of God’s creation.” According to Prester, Roman Baptists are the only “true believers” in a world of falsehood. Outside the church, Tanner seems surrounded by Christian fundamentalism; he encounters it on his rounds at Dixie Christian Hospital, whose new administrator, Helen Blackthorn, tells him, “here we worship the God of life, not the culture of death.” Deaton’s protagonist runs into more conflict when Prester’s father, Kevin, is admitted to Dixie Christian with a serious health problem, and Tanner increasingly clashes with pathologist James Pincer, “a no-nonsense Christian.” The author ably sets up the first half of his novel as an intriguing story about a science-minded doctor in a small community, where he antagonizes influential people whose worldview “borders on insanity,” as Deaton, a medical doctor, puts it in a foreword. In this part of the book, the author’s own medical background lends the hospital scenes credibility. However, it also makes the prose awkwardly dense at times: “Few people are cognizant of the California court case wherein an oncologist, who had treated a man with pancreatic cancer, was sued by the patient’s wife after the patient died.” Later, the novel devolves into a dystopian fantasy about a “Personhood Amendment” and a full-blown military civil war between the Roman Baptists and “godless liberals,” and Deaton’s satire feels much less controlled. Many readers will find themselves wishing that he’d stuck to his genuinely interesting and more realistic opening gambit.

An uneven satire with an intriguing premise.