One of the damn oddest metafictions you're likely to find, Jehovah Resigns-- part espionage thriller, part science-fiction opera, part job interview-- features all manner of diversions, including new aphrodisiacs, a talking statue of Kant, a dramatic oratorio about Giordano Bruno that you wish you could go see at the Met, and not one but seven (!) alternative futures for the human race. When the Supreme Ruler of the Universe suddenly and inexplicably resigns, the fabric of existence threatens to unravel as the other gods scramble for the position. Two wholly addled human beings (one of whom, if you read carefully, might (till the very end) be male or female-- the sex is specified very, very late) find themselves mentally alloyed to the eternal principles of Reason and Necessity, and must learn how to be a wholly new sort of incarnate deity, all the while judiciously weighing the candidates, each of whom has something to hide. Underneath the story, and the book's chief interest, is a subtle, sophisticated and wholly novel metaphysic of transfinite quantities, metalogical operators, and the nature of freedom and truth. Thematically, there are shades of Heine and Bulgakov, or more recently, James Morrow and Neil Gaiman, but none of them, not even Philip K. Dick in The Divine Invasion, ever tried this. With its novel typographical experiments and multiple layers of narrative and meaning, the book will make you wish you had studied your Wittgenstein, and that Russian and English were closer in sentence-structure. Along the way there are (if you're paying attention) many deeply moving moments of humane insight about music, meaning, and the human heart, climaxing in a mini-Wagnerian (if that's not an oxymoron) version of Faust and a suspended Battle of Ragnarök, that reads like an episode of Doctor Who told a la Derrida's Glas. A maddening and entertaining neo-gnostic experiment in unclassifiability, Jehovah Resigns takes to a new level the variations upon Matthew Arnold's account of western culture as an alliance-cum-bar-brawl between Hellenism and Hebraism. ( )