Imaginary Friends

It felt a little too on the nose to be reading this novel as brief respites from working intensely to finish my thesis corrections, as it concerns academia gone wrong. (I finished my corrections, though, which is more than can be said of the research study ‘Imaginary Friends’ is centred on.) A senior, famous-in-his-discipline academic invites our narrator to infiltrate a local cult with him. The Truth Seekers, as they call themselves, believe in a mashup of spiritualist christianity and alien conspiracy theories. I found the narrator intermittently disagreeable (when lusting after Verena, figurehead of the cult) and sometimes very sympathetic (when trying to determine whether his PI is insane). Not that much actually happens, when show more it came down to it, but the dynamics of the close-knit cult group are portrayed in a sensitive and distinctly compelling fashion. I really like the insight that they were more like family than friends as such - people who felt like they had to spend time together and support each other, despite having relatively little in common. The narrator’s dilemmas about the extent to which observing and interacting with the group changed it are cleverly done. Issues of class are handled especially neatly. The psychology of small religious groups is deconstructed at the same time as the study of same, which is quite a trick to pull of this tidily. Overall it’s a clever and subtle novel, therefore probably better read when not so tired and preoccupied with your own research as I was. show less

A wonderful book about two sociologists studying a small-town religious cult. Sharp, funny, brilliantly-observed, it left me full of questions about the nature of sex, love, madness, academia, and belief.

A must read for all sociologists. Very funny. This novel is clearly based upon Leon Festinger's controversial research project.