The Savior and the Singing Machine

As he did with Creator and Satan's Psychotherapy and Cure, Jeremy Leven has once again created pure magic with this hilarious, moving, and thought-provoking tale of a man who abandons all to search for Perfect Love. And what could be more perfect to love than the Messiah, who now reappears in the prophesied Second Coming as a knockout young female. Declared to be the God of All Gods, She (her name is, in fact, She) beckons our protagonist, the somewhat bewildered Max Pincus, on a journey which is part Canterbury Tales and part, it becomes increasingly evident, a reworking of the New Testament, from virgin birth to Sermon on the Mount. Ultimately a love-story, along Pincus's journey to find the new young female Savior, he finds himself, not only attracting a growing cast of self-proclaimed apostles (who, it appears, are neither called nor chosen, but don't especially care), but encountering, as well, the formidable and gigantic - and perhaps lethal - Singing Machine, a device with a will of its own and a continually morphing and haunting song that leads all who join Pincus to seek out the new Savior, hoping that She will explain the song's true meaning, a desire that understandably requires them to drag the huge device along behind them wherever they go.But it is the budding romance between the Savior and Max Pincus that drives the story, as the so-called apostles attempt to determine whether She is, in fact, the Savior, in which case they have strong reservations about Pincus dating her. At the end, Leven ingeniously leaves us with a tale which suggests a world which might have been, had the true intentions of the Messiah been realized. It is a comedy of the highest order.