Name: Dana Kraft's review of The Great Good Thing by Andrew Klavan
Item: The Great Good Thing
Rating: 3
Author: Dana Kraft

Andrew Klavan

Edgar Award-winner and internationally bestselling novelist tells of his improbable conversion from agnostic Jewish-intellectual to baptized Christian and of the books that led him there. "Had I stumbled on the hallelujah truth, or just gone mad--or, that is, had I gone mad again?" No one was more surprised than Andrew Klavan when, at the age of fifty, he found himself about to be baptized. Best known for his hard-boiled, white-knuckle thrillers and for the movies made from them--among them True Crime (directed by Clint Eastwood) and Don't Say a Word (starring Michael Douglas)--Klavan was born in a suburban Jewish enclave outside New York City. He left the faith of his childhood behind to live most of his life as an agnostic in the secular, sophisticated atmosphere of New York, London, and Los Angeles. But his lifelong quest for truth--in his life and in his work--was leading him to a place he never expected. In The Great Good Thing, Klavan tells how his troubled childhood caused him to live inside the stories in his head and grow up to become an alienated young writer whose disconnection and rage devolved into depression and suicidal breakdown. But he also stumbled into a genuine romance, a passionate and committed marriage whose uncommon and enduring devotion convinced him of the reality of love. In those years, Klavan fought to ignore the insistent call of God, a call glimpsed in a childhood Christmas at the home of a beloved babysitter, in a transcendent moment at his daughter's birth, and in a snippet of a baseball game broadcast that moved him from the brink of suicide. But more than anything, the call of God existed in stories--the stories Klavan loved to read and the stories he loved to write. The Great Good Thing is the dramatic, soul-searching story of a man born into an age of disbelief who had to abandon everything he thought he knew in order to find his way to the truth.

A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ

The Great Good Thing

Dana Kraft

I found this book to be most thought-provoking when Klavan uses his storytelling expertise to describe the story arc of the Bible and to offer insights into the tricks our mind can play on our faith. I've quoted a few below. The parts that talked about absolute truth vs relativism reminded me of the recent books I read by Flannery O'Connor where awful things can be justified in the absence of faith. All that said, as a memoir, I didn't particularly enjoy it.

"...every idea comes with its own history, but that doesn’t make it false. The genesis of a belief is no disproof of it. The truth remains true no matter how or why we come to find it." P. 70

"If we don’t accept our inner experience as real, then only man’s material desires have any meaning. Our yearnings for pleasure and power are all that’s left." P. 195

"...it had seemed to me the possibilities for renewal and personal transformation were infinite. But, of course, in the end you discover you are still yourself, no matter what." P. 207

"The human heart is so steeped in self-deception that it can easily outrun its own lies." P. 238.

"...the ultimate irrational prejudice of the human mind: the belief that the symbols of reality are more real than the reality they symbolize. That’s us all over. We believe that money is more valuable than the work it represents, that sex is more essential than the love it expresses, that an actor is more admirable than the hero he portrays, that flesh is more alive than spirit." P. 246

Dana Kraft &
The Great Good Thing by Andrew Klavan

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Dana Kraft &The Great Good Thing by Andrew Klavan

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Dana Kraft &
The Great Good Thing by Andrew Klavan