Book Review: The Loser Letters

I should have known that Mary Eberstadt was capable of the high-wire act that she performs throughout The Loser Letters. Other essayists sometimes defend traditional views enthusiastically (here, for example, is Robert Stacy McCain writing well about monogamy and survival), but Eberstadt has five-octave range. Could a woman who dialed up “scholarly simmer” for the thankless task of alerting the rest of us to “The Weight of Smut” also be convincing in the persona of a recent college graduate?

The answer is yes. Not just yes, mind you, but “Hell, yes!”

In ten slyly satirical letters, “A former Christian” (25, single, educated, perky) takes advantage of free time in what she thinks is a drug rehabilitation program to write letters to prominent atheists. The book-length result is what you might get if you crossed C.S. Lewis with P.J. O’Rourke (the old “Ghostbusters” advice about not crossing separate energy streams comes to mind, but Eberstadt wears her influences lightly, else there would have been no coherent way to describe God as a capital-L “loser”).

At 140 pages and change, The Loser Letters is a supplemental kind of book in the sense that it is not The Handbook of Christian Apologetics, or the locomotive with which Edward Feser flattened postmodern atheism in The Last Superstition. Unlike the authors of those comprehensive and serious books, Eberstadt pays special attention to atheism’s disdain for family life, and parts of three letters on that subject are particularly affecting.

Ignatius Press was smart to buy ads for this “comic tale of life, death, and atheism” on some high-profile web sites (I received a review copy of the book from The Catholic Company after having seen a blurb for it at First Things).

Mindful of the saying that “against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand,” Eberstadt serves up a wickedly funny yet thought-provoking little opus, even managing to work a simple plot into her “friendly advice” for atheists.

Importantly, Eberstadt is at home in formal English, but also understands the preferred lingo of atheism and the patois of “the young and the restless.” This being a satire, the atheists in it are “Brights” (not a term that she made up), and the believers, especially Christians, are “Dulls.” Labeling like that could have been fey or clumsy in less skillful hands, but she makes it work.

The Loser Letters is a shining example of what Sarah Palin might call “refudiation,” and like that fortuitous coinage, it has more wit than you might at first suspect. Don’t let the (mostly) cheery tone or the careful use of abbreviations like “BFF” fool you. By the time Eberstadt in an afterword thanks friends of her children for giving her a window into teenage “cadences, energy, drama, and Facebook pages,” any sentient reader will have long since realized that she is smart and observant.

The paperback edition of The Loser Letters retails for about ten dollars. On the “three-dollar cappuccino” scale of value, it would be a bargain at twice the price.