February 1, 2025
A journalist struggles to uncover a mysterious sect's secrets--and his own. When magazine journalist Faruq Zaidi departs on an immersion project that takes him inside a religious group known only as "the nameless," the committed atheist thinks he's leaving behind his own emotional turmoil following the death of his father, a devout Muslim, a year earlier. Led by Odo, an aging but vital Black Vietnam War veteran, the collective operates from a highly developed base known as the Forbidden City in California's redwood country. Following a set of principles known as the "18 Utterances," its members get "hipped" and are urged to remove "distortion" from their lives as they espouse an enigmatic philosophy they say emphasizes "seeing beauty and making beauty," while believing that "death is a beautiful thing too." In alternating sections, Cuffy intersperses the story of Faruq's effort to overcome the increasingly puzzling and ominous obstacles to penetrating the group's essence with the script of a documentary about the nameless' bitter, highly publicized clash with a fundamentalist Christian church at its founding site in a small Texas town and vivid scenes of Odo's terrifying, disillusioning experience as a teenage foot soldier in the jungles of Vietnam. As Faruq's projected six-week reporting assignment stretches into months, his questions about the nature of the nameless and its leader's motivations and true beliefs only grow deeper. All the while, he wrestles with his own lack of faith, along with lingering grief over the sudden death of his mother when he was 12 and the way anti-Muslim sentiment in the wake of the 9/11 attack only a week afterward robbed him of the opportunity to mourn her passing properly. In exploring this corner of American religious life, Cuffy follows the recent work of Bret Anthony Johnston (We Burn Daylight, 2024) and Daniel Torday (The 12th Commandment, 2023) that dealt with religious cults, but she approaches the subject with a fresh, multifaceted perspective that makes it uniquely hers. A well-guided journey along the boundary between faith and doubt.
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February 1, 2025
Cuffy's latest novel moves across three different narratives. The main thread is set in the present in a sort of commune for a group called the nameless in California. Faruq, a journalist, is living with them to try to understand the appeal of Odo, their founder and leader. The story jumps back in time to Odo's experiences in the Vietnam War in 1969 and 1970. The other third of the story transcribes a documentary film made a few years before Faruq's attempts to understand the nameless and a legal battle between the group and a fundamentalist Christian church in Texas. When living with the nameless, Faruq probes and prods to try to understand their vague pronouncements and the joy Odo's followers clearly feel. Instead, Faruq learns a lot about himself, in particular, experiences he tries to ignore as a Muslim American after 9/11 and his relationship with his recently deceased father. The Vietnam sections are well-researched, vividly described, and desperately tragic. Each narrative thread explores faith and the human need to belong, and Faruq's journey is a fascinating one to follow.
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