Metaphysical Exile: On J. M. Coetzee's Jesus Fictions by Robert Pippin (review)

achieving the American dream and individual self-realization through material and economic gain by suggesting “the more a Chicanx believes in American exceptionalism, the further she is from spiritual fulfillment” (94). Twenty-nine works are abbreviated in the beginning of the book, which gives one the sense of the broad overview scope of a book that often spends only several pages on individual novels. If there is a downside to this approach, the brevity comes at the cost of sustained argument about individual texts and contributes to the sense we have by the end of the book that its illuminating discussions about American exceptionalism, the American dream, and Manifest Destiny are sometimes only somewhat loosely connected. The lack of a separate conclusion at the end of the book likewise weakens its larger sustained argument about its overall project. But the individual readings are rewarding and fair-minded throughout, contributing to our sense that the literature of what Charles Taylor calls our “secular age” (qtd. in Carson 23) should best be thought of in Taylor’s terms of pluralization of belief options rather than the older notions of decay or disappearance.