Only Begotten Daughter

Murray Katz keeps the lighthouse at Angel's Eye near Atlantic City and makes his living, such as it is, from a sperm bank, and one day his donation begins to gestate on its own in a jar. The daughter who emerges is Julie Katz, and she is God's second child, half-sister to a brother she has never met. Murray raises her as best a Jewish lighthouse keeper can, warning her constantly against the miracles she can obviously perform, on the grounds that a saviour's career is short. Julie tries: she works as an advice columnist under a false name, falls in love, and watches her friend Bix Constantine and her father die anyway, because the power to heal is not the same as permission to use it. Meanwhile the Reverend Billy Milk, having lost an eye and a son, has built a theocracy in Atlantic City and is burning people in it. Julie's road runs through Hell, which Morrow renders as a bureaucratic resort, and towards a confrontation with the question that has always undone theodicy. It is angry, blasphemous, very funny, and finally a novel about deciding to be decent without cosmic backing.