This is actually among my favorite books I've ever read. It's full of a rigor of self-truthfulness in order to produce the effect it has: every path of least resistance is nonexistent, nearly every possible lazy turn into a well-treaded, trope-adhering plotline or message, from the broadest themes and plots events, to every choice about narrative order and pacing, to the smallest observations and turns of phrase, is struck out and resolutely avoided. What remains in the book instead is only those possibilities that no other writer explores. The personal, contrarian convictions and in-betweens.
It would be hard to enumerate them here. I'll pick one example: The fact that the word 'god' is even attempted to be defined (while its definition applies to a) not everyone b) multiple people who are not God-the-character AND YET c) is based on the paradoxical, infinitely deep, riddle of an identity for God used in Judaism (ehyeh asher ehyeh), might give one indication of the way statements and ideas are treated here.
I saw another review elsewhere say The Lives That Argue For Us was like staring into the soul of a fierce and burning-sharp creature whose patterns I could trace forever, like Tamar the very first scene in the first book of this series[The Stars That Rise At Dawn], and the climactic scenes as his heart has been lost long ago, that he cannot lie to himself or deny his love, his desire, and his truthfulness to those things that are of him, any longer, not even in the face of an unknown irrevocable sail over the edge of the known world, forever, with no idea what is in store for him ...... then, the second half of the same scene (a microcosm of the structure of the book!), when he experiences that tip-over-the-edge-of-the-world...This person phrased it more poignantly than I could.
Main characters: a god (moon drowned in salt ocean, tsunami, rip in spacetime), God (big bang fire, covenant-maker, inviter-seducer to existing), seafarer (of oceans, of souls, of infinity, doom-laden), another god (gentle, protective, soft, just as Much), yet another god (ancient Beast of the book of revelation but who who sealed herself away and kept herself a secret, to avoid causing the end of the world).
Minor characters: casts of books 1 and 2 in the series, old drunken mentor, aging punkrocker holy bartender, waiter angel (Wormwood), fallen angel similar to sufism's Iblis.
Favorite chapters: "and the last question", "is agony, an infinity".
Favorite epigraph: The one to "is agony, an infinity," which is a spoiler. Runner up: to sift my | self the horizon | of my self