From Jennifer Frey, reviewing Phil Klay’s Missionaries and Christopher Beha’s The Index of Self-Destructive Acts:
Many reviews of Klay’s novel have focused on what it reveals about the unjust economic and political order that drives globalized combat. But these systems, while undoubtedly corrupt, are symptoms of the deeper issues that interest Klay. His novel suggests that the human story will always take shape in response to our wounds. For each of Klay’s characters, as for us, trauma and the possibility of transcendence, suffering and redemption, are mysteriously and irrevocably intertwined. […]
If Beha’s novel explores two competing philosophical pictures of human freedom—Frank’s liberal humanism and Sam’s reductive naturalism—in the end the reader is left to wonder whether we need a third option, one that is adequate to the mystery of our nature. For it is in our choices that we experience the limits of our self-understanding and the pressures of our unchosen circumstances. We are forced to make our decisions within the liminal space between the generality of what we know and want and the particular demands of our circumstances. It is a shadowy realm, between the possible and actual, and it is here that human freedom becomes both real and burdensome. It is the place where we feel most deeply our helplessness—and our need for outside illumination or aid.
In the end, it seems that Frank points us to the possibility of a third way. For Frank recognizes that our actions are meaningless without others to interpret them; he affirms, with Wittgenstein, that the “sense of the world must lie outside the world.” Frank sees, in a way that Sam does not, the need for transcendence, because the contradictions of human life cannot be resolved from within it. To see and accept this truth is to catch a glimpse of what true freedom might be.
While Klay’s novel is more explicitly theological in its vision and Beha’s more philosophical, both deal with the reality of the woundedness of human nature, and both connect this woundedness to our struggle to make sense of our own lives and to attain even a modicum of self-knowledge. Each novel suggests that we cannot heal or fix ourselves, and that if our longed-for redemption ever comes, it will not be at our own hands, or of our own design.