Poor Einstein. Long after his death, atheists and agnostics, Jews and secular Jews are still trying to claim him for their side. Einstein was remarkably coy—you can interpret his quotes on God and religion in many contradictory ways. But reading Chris Hedges’ new book, it’s not hard to believe the well-circulated rumor (which has even popped up in Richard Dawkins’ chat rooms) that during his life Einstein was more wary of one group claiming him than all the others: the atheists.

Proselytizing atheists have been very busy recently writing religion-bashing best sellers, from Sam Harris’ The End of Faith (2005) to Mr. Dawkins’ The God Delusion (2006) to Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great (2007). Mr. Hedges’ book, I Don’t Believe in Atheists, is a deep investigation into the historical and intellectual failings of these atheists’ ideas.

The new atheists see science and reason as the keys to human progress. They believe that only when we reject irrational religious forces can we move forward as a society. Mr. Dawkins thinks that we’ve come a long way since Biblical times. “In today’s enlightened societies,” he writes, “any modern legal system would have prosecuted Abraham for child abuse.” Of course, he allows, there are “local and temporary setbacks” to this forward march—like, for example, the current occupant of the White House. Mr. Hedges disagrees: “Dawkins’ hope that George Bush is an aberration on the road to enlightenment is naïve.” There will always be human fallibility, he insists, and anyone who believes that we can attain “collective salvation, whether through science, Jesus Christ, or Muhammad” is ignoring human history and human nature.

Mr. Hedges confesses that at first he paid little attention to the atheist new wave. He started Mr. Harris’ book shortly after it was published but soon “put it aside.” As the son of a Presbyterian minister, a graduate from seminary and a former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, Mr. Hedges found Mr. Harris’ arguments about religion and world affairs “childish.” “I did not take Harris seriously,” Mr. Hedges writes. “This was a mistake.”

Then last May, Mr. Hedges debated Mr. Harris and then Mr. Hitchens. During the first debate, Mr. Hedges was asked about a Pew poll about suicide bombing. He tried to give a nuanced explanation of the driving forces of fundamentalism, arguing that repressive political systems and “personal and economic despair” are what propel all fundamentalists.

Mr. Harris replied: “O.K., well, let me deal with your taking measure of the Muslim world. Happily, we do not assess public opinion polls by having New York Times journalists go out and live in the Muslim world and make friends and get a vibe.” He went on, “How many people did you ask whether they supported suicide bombing?”

I Don’t Believe in Atheists was written in response to those debates. Mr. Hedges concedes that the new atheists can be witty and amusing, but the danger, as he sees it, is that they’re just as much fundamentalists as the God-struck zealots they oppose.

“Any form of knowledge that claims to be absolute ceases to be knowledge. It becomes a form of faith,” Mr. Hedges writes. The atheists believe their ideas are the only right ones and those that disagree “are ignorant at best, and probably evil.” Just ask Mr. Hitchens, who declared during his debate with Mr. Hedges, “I think the enemies of civilization should be beaten and killed and defeated and I don’t make any apology for it.”

EINSTEIN ISN’T THE only dead cultural icon the atheists want on their team. In God Is Not Great, Mr. Hitchens seeks to “own” Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He argues that King was a humanist—“in no real as opposed to nominal sense … was he a Christian.” Mr. Hedges vehemently disagrees; for him, King is evidence that religious inspiration can act for good, moving millions “to fight for justice and lead lives of compassion.” But the atheists, he writes, “are helpless when confronted by a faith that challenges their caricature.”

Ultimately, Mr. Hedges believes that atheism is fine as long as it does not try to “substitute itself for religion” or “subjugate others who have opposing beliefs.” The new atheists do both—and try to claim the dead.

Maybe Einstein was even smarter than we thought.

Julia Simon is studying Middle Eastern languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago. She can be reached at books@observer.com.

The protagonist, Thomas Railles, is an American living in a French village in the Pyrenees. He’s a painter, of course, a portraitist: He cherishes mystery, seeking depth both in the faces he paints and in the everyday. When he reads the American paper, perhaps a few days old (“not that it mattered in the Siberian scheme of things”), Thomas looks beyond the two-dimensional print into America, “at the life behind the news. What he saw often was the world of his youth, the vast expanse of the Midwest.”

Mr. Just (himself an Illinois boy) gives his characters many opportunities to ponder the heartland. As Thomas reads of rain in Cincinnati, he contemplates “the strange mnemonics of interior cities: Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis.” His wife, Florette, in a similar Proustian reverie, mulls over the “strange place names” of America: “Minnesota was north, Iowa west.” Thomas’ hometown of LaBarre, a Wisconsin Lake Wobegon, was a “beautiful town to grow up in.” He and his friends remember it as “a kind of lazy American paradise where the days seemed to go on forever to the rhythm of crickets.” But it was “no town to stay in.”

Before finishing college, Thomas leaves LaBarre, pursuing a career in portraiture in New York City. A few lovers, countless portraits and many years later (and after dabbling in “odd jobs” for the C.I.A., a subplot whose substance stems from Thomas’ eventual realization that as a man of “pure brushstroke,” he was terribly miscast as a spy), Thomas settles in St. Michel du Valcabrère, where he builds a home with Florette, who was born in the village.

Though an American reader may initially cast her as a grown-up Nouvelle Vague femme, wide-eyed, stylish and alluring (a sweetheart once told her she resembled Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim), Florette is a wonderfully nuanced character, as thick as the paint in Thomas’ portrait of her (“the oils seemed to him to explode off the canvas”). She’s full of worldly deliberations, from her musings on Onassis (“perhaps tycoons were remorseful after their own fashion”) to her theory on the American drift (“Florette thought America had a cult of restlessness …. If you didn’t like the hand you were dealt—the wife, the job, the color of your hair or the shape of your bosom—you dealt yourself another”). In an act not of meta-textual self-reflexivity but of extraction—taking her out of the text and placing her in the real world—Mr. Just writes, “She was not a character in a novel.” But thankfully this novel has Florette; it is she who fuels the plot.

The story begins on a November evening; after dinner, Florette goes out walking and falls, twisting her ankle. As the night grows cold, four Moroccan terrorists traversing the mountain with their contraband find her on the path. The men cut her throat just as she’s about to freeze to death.

Thomas’ reaction to this “terrorist act” sets him apart from his childhood friends and the Americans whom he happens to meet in the village. The author expertly positions the latter as symbols of America: literally blind and entitled. Mr. Just seems to pity them, as if the characters themselves stubbornly insisted on their own one-dimensionality.

The blind American enters the village café bearing a “legend” on his cap, “NYPD 9/11.” He wants to start a fight with the café owner—“and for what?” the villagers ask themselves. Thomas learns that this man was not NYPD (although, as his friend reports, “in New York City we’re all cops now”) but an insurance salesman who was in the towers during the attack. Now he’s blind, angry and, according to his friend, anger is “his right.”

The entitled American is Thomas’ neighbor’s niece; she’s come to St. Michel to inspect the house bequeathed to her by her uncle. She’s blunt and presumptuous. (On Paris: “The French don’t deserve it.”) Like the blind man with his unwavering anger, she’s desperately holding onto a theory that her deceased uncle placed a curse on her family. She wants Thomas to pity her, to pay attention to her, and when Thomas politely brushes off her questions about her uncle and Florette’s murder, she barks, “Don’t you want to get to the bottom of it? Fill in the blanks? See that justice is done?” She cannot fathom that Thomas is “content” in the blanks. He’s someone who doesn’t feel entitled to anger.

Later in the novel, however, when Thomas’ childhood friend Bernhard, a C.I.A. agent, offers Thomas an opportunity to witness the interrogation of Florette’s murderers, Thomas agrees—though not without a canvas and an easel. For when he asks Bernhard what the main suspect looks like, Bernhard replies, “Shit, Thomas …. What you might expect. He looks like a Moroccan, for Chrissakes.” Thomas seeks to probe into the cliché modern terrorist and maybe find a way to frame Florette’s death.

Mr. Just charges this act of portraiture, set in an interrogation room, with the tension of the still-accumulating questions of the novel—questions of grief, of justice, of revenge, of “never.” Forgetfulness recognizes the ubiquity of “never” in the post-9/11 world (“Never again,” “We will never forget”), and the fear: If we forget, will we also forgive?

Mr. Just doesn’t answer these questions directly. Instead, he offers Thomas’ coy reply to a question posed by the interrogator: “[W]e must be careful what we forget, wouldn’t you say?” Thomas answers, “We must not be thoughtless.”

Julia Simon is studying history and comparative literature at the University of Chicago.

The protagonist, Thomas Railles, is an American living in a French village in the Pyrenees. He’s a painter, of course, a portraitist: He cherishes mystery, seeking depth both in the faces he paints and in the everyday. When he reads the American paper, perhaps a few days old (“not that it mattered in the Siberian scheme of things”), Thomas looks beyond the two-dimensional print into America, “at the life behind the news. What he saw often was the world of his youth, the vast expanse of the Midwest.”

Mr. Just (himself an Illinois boy) gives his characters many opportunities to ponder the heartland. As Thomas reads of rain in Cincinnati, he contemplates “the strange mnemonics of interior cities: Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis.” His wife, Florette, in a similar Proustian reverie, mulls over the “strange place names” of America: “Minnesota was north, Iowa west.” Thomas’ hometown of LaBarre, a Wisconsin Lake Wobegon, was a “beautiful town to grow up in.” He and his friends remember it as “a kind of lazy American paradise where the days seemed to go on forever to the rhythm of crickets.” But it was “no town to stay in.”

Before finishing college, Thomas leaves LaBarre, pursuing a career in portraiture in New York City. A few lovers, countless portraits and many years later (and after dabbling in “odd jobs” for the C.I.A., a subplot whose substance stems from Thomas’ eventual realization that as a man of “pure brushstroke,” he was terribly miscast as a spy), Thomas settles in St. Michel du Valcabrère, where he builds a home with Florette, who was born in the village.

Though an American reader may initially cast her as a grown-up Nouvelle Vague femme, wide-eyed, stylish and alluring (a sweetheart once told her she resembled Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim), Florette is a wonderfully nuanced character, as thick as the paint in Thomas’ portrait of her (“the oils seemed to him to explode off the canvas”). She’s full of worldly deliberations, from her musings on Onassis (“perhaps tycoons were remorseful after their own fashion”) to her theory on the American drift (“Florette thought America had a cult of restlessness …. If you didn’t like the hand you were dealt—the wife, the job, the color of your hair or the shape of your bosom—you dealt yourself another”). In an act not of meta-textual self-reflexivity but of extraction—taking her out of the text and placing her in the real world—Mr. Just writes, “She was not a character in a novel.” But thankfully this novel has Florette; it is she who fuels the plot.

The story begins on a November evening; after dinner, Florette goes out walking and falls, twisting her ankle. As the night grows cold, four Moroccan terrorists traversing the mountain with their contraband find her on the path. The men cut her throat just as she’s about to freeze to death.

Thomas’ reaction to this “terrorist act” sets him apart from his childhood friends and the Americans whom he happens to meet in the village. The author expertly positions the latter as symbols of America: literally blind and entitled. Mr. Just seems to pity them, as if the characters themselves stubbornly insisted on their own one-dimensionality.

The blind American enters the village café bearing a “legend” on his cap, “NYPD 9/11.” He wants to start a fight with the café owner—“and for what?” the villagers ask themselves. Thomas learns that this man was not NYPD (although, as his friend reports, “in New York City we’re all cops now”) but an insurance salesman who was in the towers during the attack. Now he’s blind, angry and, according to his friend, anger is “his right.”

The entitled American is Thomas’ neighbor’s niece; she’s come to St. Michel to inspect the house bequeathed to her by her uncle. She’s blunt and presumptuous. (On Paris: “The French don’t deserve it.”) Like the blind man with his unwavering anger, she’s desperately holding onto a theory that her deceased uncle placed a curse on her family. She wants Thomas to pity her, to pay attention to her, and when Thomas politely brushes off her questions about her uncle and Florette’s murder, she barks, “Don’t you want to get to the bottom of it? Fill in the blanks? See that justice is done?” She cannot fathom that Thomas is “content” in the blanks. He’s someone who doesn’t feel entitled to anger.

Later in the novel, however, when Thomas’ childhood friend Bernhard, a C.I.A. agent, offers Thomas an opportunity to witness the interrogation of Florette’s murderers, Thomas agrees—though not without a canvas and an easel. For when he asks Bernhard what the main suspect looks like, Bernhard replies, “Shit, Thomas …. What you might expect. He looks like a Moroccan, for Chrissakes.” Thomas seeks to probe into the cliché modern terrorist and maybe find a way to frame Florette’s death.

Mr. Just charges this act of portraiture, set in an interrogation room, with the tension of the still-accumulating questions of the novel—questions of grief, of justice, of revenge, of “never.” Forgetfulness recognizes the ubiquity of “never” in the post-9/11 world (“Never again,” “We will never forget”), and the fear: If we forget, will we also forgive?

Mr. Just doesn’t answer these questions directly. Instead, he offers Thomas’ coy reply to a question posed by the interrogator: “[W]e must be careful what we forget, wouldn’t you say?” Thomas answers, “We must not be thoughtless.”

Julia Simon is studying history and comparative literature at the University of Chicago.