The Devil and Daniel Silverman [Paperback]

Theodore Roszak (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2003

Danny Silverman’s first novel reached #10 on the New York Times best-seller list, but that was 20 years ago. Now middle-aged, he and his partner, Martin, an African-American actor, are getting by on the residuals from Martin’s cancelled TV cop series when Danny gets an offer he can’t refuse: a speaking gig in a Minnesota bible college that will net him a small fortune. Why me? Silverman wonders, but he’ll take the money and run. What can happen? Only a record-breaking snowstorm that traps him under the same roof as the evangelical Christian faculty who see this Jewish homosexual writer from San Francisco as the incarnation of the anti-Christ. Forced to defend all he believes in—sexual equality, human rights, same-sex marriage; dancing! vodka! coffee!—Silverman finds himself on the front lines of the culture wars dividing the nation today.

Best known as a social historian, Theodore Roszak is also the author of cult-status novels such as Flicker, a Hollywood horror satire, and The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, a sensual retelling of the gothic classic. Now Roszak brings us a hilarious novel of politics and ideas in which the battle for the moral heart of America is waged between a college full of scripture-spouting fundamentalists and one gay humanist who thinks they’re full of crap.

Theodore Roszak lives in Berkeley, where he is a professor of history at California State University, Hayward. The author of 18 books, including the international bestseller The Making of a Counter Culture, he has twice been nominated for the National Book Award. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s. The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein (Random House) received The James Tiptree Award for "literature that expands our understanding of gender."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This story of a gay Jewish novelist's trip from San Francisco to a small religious college in the Midwest is an uneven, fitfully entertaining satire. Roszak, a social historian (The Making of a Counter Culture) and novelist (Flicker), begins with some witty jabs at the publishing industry. Daniel Silverman is a writer whose last success was nearly 20 years ago, when Analyzing Anna ("solid middle-brow exercises in mordant but good-humored social satire") spent one week at number 10 on the New York Times bestseller list. Now his job teaching university extension courses isn't paying the bills, and his agent has long since dumped him. When Minnesota's Faith College invites him to speak on humanism, he can hardly refuse-they're offering $12,000. When he arrives, he finds that the faculty members believe, among other things, that homosexuals are unclean and humanists are going to hell. To make matters worse, he is trapped by a ferocious blizzard for several days. At this point, the book becomes bogged down in broad, predictable sendups of the American religious right. Silverman has heated arguments with his bigoted hosts, who talk about "the nearly monopolistic influence your people hold over the mass media" and insist that evidence for the Holocaust is "exaggerated." Roszak does some damage control by turning to farce, as a liquor-soaked Silverman begins to suspect that his hosts are planning to kill him before the end of the storm. But the novel's intermittent pleasures are weighed down by the clumsy social critique.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

What happens when worlds collide? Especially when a "secular humanist" is stranded in a group of Far Right Christian evangelicals? Roszak confronts these issues in his new novel. Daniel Silverman is a once successful--now failing--writer, gay, a secular Jew, and an overall ornery person. Living in San Francisco, he is booked as a speaker at a tiny Christian college in northern Minnesota, and he doesn't know why. He hasn't had work or speaking engagements in years. Once he arrives, to give a lecture on "Religious Humanism," he is immediately confronted with a cloistered community of like-minded Christians who doubt everything Silverman says, and he ends up defending his very way of life--much of which he privately despises. Trapped on campus in a blizzard, Silverman himself eventually becomes a Christ figure--persecuted, almost unto death, by righteous "believers" who can't stand his tolerance. Despite the smug viewpoints Roszak puts into Silverman's mouth and the unbearable characters he creates the evangelicals to be, he tells a good story about believing in yourself and your lifestyle. Michael Spinella
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Leapfrog Press; 1 edition (January 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0967952077
• ISBN-13: 978-0967952079
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,961,639 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Theodore Roszak (1933-2011) was the author of fifteen books, including the 1969 classic "The Making of a Counter Culture." He was professor emeritus of history at California State University, and lived in Berkeley, California.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This Book Is Dynamite!, April 19, 2003

By 

"drwspoon" (Garner, NC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Devil and Daniel Silverman (Paperback)

Be careful of picking up this book-- it might just make your head explode. Although it is a droll, well-paced farce there are passages that did indeed set my heart pounding. I can only recommend this book to you if you believe:

1) You have an open mind
2) Homosexuality is acceptable between consenting adults
3) Women should have control over their own bodies
4) Evolution is an incontrovertible, scientific theory
5) The Bible was written by men

If you are not comfortable with these ideas as well as the idea that men and women should lead joyful, spirited lives filled with compassion with others, then I am afraid this book will disturb and anger you. As for me, it is good to know that I am not the only secular humanist left in this country.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Beating down straw men can be fun . . ., March 10, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Devil and Daniel Silverman (Paperback)

In Mr. Roszak's book there is no question who the good guy is, and there is no moral confusion to challenge the reader. He sets up a series of reprehensible, cardboard characters and smacks them about with sarcastic glee.

However, that's okay. In fact, that's more than okay, it's necessary. We "liberals" spend too much time worrying about the gray areas in between. Sometimes a person has to simply react, and this book is clearly Mr. Roszak's visceral reaction to religious intolerance. Bravo, I say. Many on the right revel in savaging straw men, there's nothing wrong with giving it back to them now and again.

I found this book fun much the same way "Ditto Heads" find Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly fun. It offered me a few hours of unadulterated fascist bashing unburdened by an opposing viewpoint. I didn't come away from it with a more nuanced view of the various sides of the "culture war." Rather, I got some laughs and, I'll admit, a few moments of smug satisfaction. Like chocolate, it can't be your main source of sustenance, but it's a nice treat every now and then.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Make mine droll, but real, March 10, 2003

By 

O. J. King "ojking" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Devil and Daniel Silverman (Paperback)

Having lived on both coasts and in the upper Midwest, my view of this novel was from understanding the blinders both groups walk around with in viewing their realities. Roszak captured them perfectly. While Publishers Weakly is correct in their viewing "broad, predictable sendups of the American religious right," they fail to understand that such predictable tensions are really critiques of the elitist left humanist, the ones finding it necessary to feel morally and ethically superior to those narrow-minded Midwesterners. If that was not the case then why, at one point in his defense of humanism, does Silverman question his own motive to proselytize, knowing his stated belief in accepting others and their points of view in a multi-valued society?

No, this book is a gem, both in humor and in social thought. What Thomas Kuhn calls normal science and Foucault calls normalizing, Roszak captures in the somewhat cowardly thoughts of Daniel Silverman. Only in the courage Silverman shows in drawing context [or, should I say, a grammar of motives] does the paradigm shift and take on what Kenneth Burke would call the comedy of life.

It can be read on both levels and I enjoyed it on both levels, the metaphysical and the social satire.