Very likely to be at the top of my "best new novels of 2012" list.

I'll most likely come back with a more thoughtful review after I've let this settle awhile, but I want to share a few immediate responses.

1. The review which led me to add this to my list compared it with David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and the comparison was to the point. Kunzru doesn't pull off the same structural tour-de-force, but the governing aesthetic is similar: a series of chronologically disparate narratives which come to together in surprising ways to bring home what's in some ways a very traditional theme, in this case the unknowability of [fill in your own term here--God, nature, the universe]. The connecting thread is the Mojave Desert from the times when the Native trickster Coyote was much less in charge than he believed to the Obama presidency. There's a contemporary plot that provides a kind of bass line to the plot, but what matters is the layering. I was also reminded of Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, another of my recent favorites, partly for the image of life in contemporary NYC (it's own kind of desert) but more because of the collective nature of the narrative. That's not exactly new--modernists messed with strategies to de-center the individual protagonist throughout the 20th century, but there's something distinctive about the flavor of what's been happening recently. Let the Great World Spin's a cousin. Not a radical set of departures, but an interesting turn in the world of fiction.

2. In True West, one of Sam Shepherd's characters says "I didn't come to the desert for philosophical reasons." Kunzru definitely gets it, but he handles the theme via a cast which almost universally *does* go to the Mojave in search of deeper meanings. One of the great things about the book is the delicacy of the irresolution: the tension of being and non-being, the sense of something much much larger than humanity's notions of itself or God. Gods Without Men is in dialog with tbe great desert books: Desert Solitaire, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, the writings of the desert fathers and mothers who struck out into the wastelands beyond Alexandria in the first three or four centuries A.D. in protest of the church's transition into a political institution. (See the collections by Thomas Merton and Rowan Williams.)

3. Great treatment of Coyote in an amusing and at times chilling variety of (dis)guises. Kunzru's been listening to the voices of the native tribes of the southwest.

Highly highly recommended.