To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris: funny and serious

From the blurb on the back cover:

"Introducing Paul O'Rourke: New Yorker, dentist and reluctant non-believer. Modern life disappoints him and love never solves any of his problems."

He is 38 years old, he has come to terms with himself and he is doing well, professionally, but he wants more. From the first chapter:

"When the Prozac stopped working and my Spanish stalled, I started going to the gym. My friend McGowan had encouraged it. Together we would lift things and put them down again. That was something that was almost everything for about a month and a half, the gym's racks of shiny weights and promises of sexual prowess, until the dismal lighting got to me and I took up indoor lacrosse."

The dismal lighting! Yes!

"Betsy Convoy was my head hygienist and a devout Roman Catholic. If ever I was tempted to become a Christian, which I never was, but if I was, I thought I would do well to become a Roman Catholic like Mrs Convoy. She attended Mass at Saint Joan of Arc Church in Jackson Heights where she expressed her faith with hand gestures, genuflections, recitations, liturgies, donations, confessions, lit candles, saints' days, and several different call-and-responses. Catholics speak, like baseball players, in the coded language of gesture. Sure the Roman Catholic Church is an abomination to man and a disgrace to God, but it comes with a highly structured Mass, several sacred pilgrimages, the oldest songs, the most impressive architecture, and a whole bunch of things to do whenever you enter the church. Taken all together, they make you one with your brother."

Here you get the general tone of the piece. Paul is flippant (the writing is very funny), gets very angry sometimes, and yet he is serious. He wants to believe but he doesn't and doesn't want to be the sort of person who does believe. He is envious of those who believe, and when he has a Jewish girlfriend, he longs to be part of her family. He longs to be an atheist Jew.

The most unfortunate thing about being an atheist wasn't the loss of God and all the comfort and reassurance of God - no small things - but the loss of a vital human vocabulary. Grace, charity, transcendence: I felt them as surely as any believer, even if we differed on the ultimate cause, and yet I had no right words for them. I had to borrow those words from an old dead order....

So there's the plot, he wants a religion that has all the benefits of religion but he doesn't want to believe. The book is a bit sprawling and many people who write it up on Amazon find the ending very unsatisfactory but in these serious matters of belief, a happy ending is not possible.