Infinite Regress is essentially about how redemption may be found there at the impoverished bottom (sometimes in surprising disguises), even in a polluted atmosphere of lies and addictions.
“Joshua Hren’s unique creative voice-and deep-seeing eyes-offer a probing portrait of America in the twilight of the West. Infinite Regress is a memento mori that does not hold back from scouring its readers with truth.”Īuthor of Giving the Devil His Due: Flannery O’Connor and The Brothers Karamazov Faith is tested by fire and rises up to purge us of the mess we make with our choices. Through complex and bitterly human characters, Hren draws readers into deep dialogues about what we believe and how we live those beliefs-especially in light of good, evil, and our fated mortality. The novel is soaked with the influence of Dostoevsky: Fyodor Karamazov, Stavrogin, Ivan, and others bubble up into the 21st century with American problems and counterparts. “What an intense read! The novel keeps asking the reader, ‘How do you live if you’re going to die?’ Infinite Regress faces the evils and tragedies of our current cultural moment with prophetic eyes. "The truth is much more complex and messy and, like Shūsaku Endō, Joshua Hren has become a master of depicting the intricacy of the faith and doubt, as well as the virtue and sin, that plague the human heart." Review of Infinite Regress in The American Conservative
this novel wants those readers who turn to fiction for wisdom as a hermit turns to silent prayer on a mountaintop." Review of Infinite Regress in The University Bookman Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters in its originality, cunning, speed, and penetration into the mystery of evil and the tensions within the human soul." the novel’s most canny feature: penetratingly funny satires of the shallowness of contemporary American life. Review of Infinite Regress in The Catholic Weekly We few, we happy few, who follow the world of Catholic fiction like it's a major league championship, welcome a new frontrunner." " Infinite Regress is easily the best Catholic novel since Beha's What Happened to Sophie Wilder. Review of Infinite Regress in The Los Angeles Review of Books
not just a brilliant novel but, in the truest sense, a divine comedy." What follows is a metaphysical duel reminiscent of the novels of Dostoevsky and Bernanos, pitting a modern-day anti-Christ against a reckless but resilient young man and his well-meaning, dysfunctional kin. When Hape, learning of his former charge’s desperate straits, proposes a perverse exchange of services, Blake finds himself tempted to test the professor’s radical theories in real life. Deep in student debt and estranged from his misanthropic, alcoholic father, Blake is haunted by the memory of his mother’s death-and by his relationship with his college mentor, a defrocked priest named Theo Hape, who is known for his adventurous theological ideas as well as for the uncanny, seductive power he wields over his students. Marquis University, Blake Yourrick has fled his family and Milwaukee, rotating from job to dead-end job-working the Bakken oilfields in Dakota and even signing on as the night caretaker of a rural abbey graveyard. In the years since his graduation from St.
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