O Sinners review: What’s the line between religion and cult?

What’s the line between a religion and a cult? It involves money, no doubt. And control over who you can see and what you can say. And a narcissistic leader too. But the line still can get fuzzy quickly; mainstream churches have had their own dark history of abuse and exploitation. One of the most engrossing elements of Nicole Cuffy’s second novel, “O Sinners!,” is how it dwells comfortably in the fuzziness, making for both a clever literary mystery novel and a meditation on the nature of faith.

The novel’s protagonist, Faruq, is almost custom-designed to dwell on these questions. An accomplished journalist for a New Yorker-style publication with a specialty in culture and race, he’s a lapsed Muslim, unattached and mourning his late father but soldiering on. As a way to stave off burnout but keep working, he pursues a more relaxing assignment, heading to a 16,000-acre compound in the Northern California redwoods that’s home to the “nameless,” a community led by Odo, “a Vietnam War vet with a penchant for coming up with catchy phrases that sounded like wisdom.”

And not just catchy phrases: The “nameless” attracts thousands of followers on Instagram with honeyed images and all the proper wellness hashtags. Faruq is understandably skeptical of all of it, especially the ways Odo seems gifted at extracting donations from very wealthy and devoted followers. One of them says they’re simply rejecting the world and its “distortions,” but to an outsider it looks a lot like captivity.

“O Sinners!” alternates across three narrative tracks. The first focuses on Faruq’s trip to the redwoods, as his initial plan to spend six weeks following Odo turns into months of immersion in the community. The second is a screenplay of a documentary about a conflict between the “nameless” and a conservative Christian Texas town that turned into a legal conflagration over sexual abuse and defamation. The third is the saga of a U.S. Army company in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970, as a group of men trek across the jungle, land in firefights and use downtime to josh and fight over God, country, race and more.

One of those soldiers becomes Odo; Cuffy’s neat trick is that we can’t determine which one until the novel’s end. It could be Preacher, who has a religious bent; or Bigger, the raw but hyperobservant new recruit; or the war-weary Silk, who already has a Purple Heart; or the aggressive Crazy Horse. Metaphorically, Cuffy suggests, a man of cult-leader timber possesses some of those characteristics. But the one thing all of those men shared was trauma, and a capacity to suppress it. Whichever man Odo is, he’s a man who’s capable of covering up pretty much anything with layers of sophistry, becoming “as smooth and serene as the Sphinx.”

Faruq’s role as the hero of the story is to tunnel into Odo’s past and motivations, even while he reckons with his own feelings about his Muslim upbringing and the way it still shapes his life. “He was forming a theory about the distinction — or lack thereof — between a cult and a religion in its nascency,” Cuffy writes. And Cuffy is too, of course. The “nameless” doesn’t have a sexually rapacious leader like NXIVM or an exploitative financial scheme like Scientology or a doomsday philosophy like Heaven’s Gate. Faruq can’t find a single disillusioned former member. Odo is a subtler figure. Though his “18 utterances” are plainly Judeo-Christian-Islamic goulash borrowing from the Ten Commandments and beyond, they seem largely benign.

Yet tucked among the encouragements to get “hipped to oneness” and “train the other sight” is the dark glimmer of where the cult-religion line blurs. The Odo commandment “do not despair of death” reads on the surface like compassion — acceptance of loss is something everyone, including Faruq, needs to manage. But on the compound, it also encourages a certain callousness, a willingness to not intervene when the worst happens. Faruq sees it when he’s compelled to help with births in the compound’s horse stables, but he also witnesses it metastasize around the humans. A religion respects death and aspires to guide followers through the grief it provokes; a cult sees death as mere evidence that life is cheap.

Cuffy is gifted at showing how that distinction empowers Odo and baffles Faruq, and the screenplay portions give the novel a concreteness — a specific drama — without which it might turn into a woollier, talkier and less dramatic book. (Much of Faruq’s stay is consumed by conversations with Odo where he bats away direct questions, giving Faruq the telling, condescending nickname of “scholar.”) Still, Cuffy’s treatment of the “nameless” isn’t entirely persuasive. What makes Odo so fascinating that people would give up millions to him isn’t clear; it’s hard to see how Odo, who spends his days delivering benisons and posing for Insta, manages what’s effectively a city; and the reader is left wondering what’s going on with the “Deep,” a militia patrolling the grounds.

But “O Sinners!” is as much a spiritual thought exercise as it is a realistic novel. The “nameless” is clearly on the cusp of something — ready to either break in the direction of a mainstream religion or give in to its darkest instincts. In that regard, Cuffy suggests, we humans don’t have to be skeptical just of what a faith is offering but of what we are unwilling to confront for the sake of being a servant to it. Odo may be proffering a “web of fairy tales and other religions,” but it doesn’t take a cult leader to sell that. And any kind of person can fall into it.

Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”