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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Welcome to heaven, where you'll learn Important Lessons -- and look fabulous! Eat all you want without getting fat! But watch out for dinosaur crap, and leave that bong at home.
Oct 13, 2003 | In David Lynch's 1977 film "Eraserhead," a tiny, smiling lady with carbuncled cheeks lives in the hero's radiator and sings, "In heaven, everything is fine. You've got your good thing and I've got mine." You'd think this would be all anyone needs to know about the afterlife's better half, but apparently not; maybe heaven can wait, but we can't. Lately, writers seem particularly compelled to describe in detail a place that traditionally just gets sketched in outline. The clouds, wings and halos of New Yorker cartoons and Hollywood movies no longer suffice.
This fall, as a follow-up to his gazillion-selling inspirational book "Tuesdays With Morrie," Mitch Albom has chosen to tell us all about "The Five People You Meet in Heaven"; and lesser mortal (at least by bestseller-list standards) Anthony DeStefano offers "A Travel Guide to Heaven." Of course the most popular recent depiction of heaven appears in Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones," a novel narrated by the young victim of a homicidal rapist, who watches the doings on earth from her celestial perch. Sebold is far less blatant about it than Albom and DeStefano, but like most accounts of the adventures of the dead, hers is primarily a commentary on how to live.
Talking about the fire and brimstone in the other place used to be the favored way of bringing the faithful back into line, but the rhetoric of the carrot has replaced that of the stick. Americans may be an overwhelmingly religious nation, but there are so many religions to choose from, it's foolish to rely on brand loyalty. Latin-American Catholic immigrants are defecting to evangelical sects at record rates; old-time Protestants turn New Age; Jews take up Buddhism. In such a crowded marketplace, top-notch promotion becomes essential, and nothing shapes our fantasies about the next life as fiercely as our anxieties about this one.
"The Lovely Bones" appeared during a summer, nearly a year after the Sept. 11 attacks, in which the abductions of several young girls got an excessive amount of media coverage. The idea that malevolent forces might randomly snatch away the family and friends of average Americans -- always a possibility, but one that usually seems remote unless you happen to watch a lot of "Unsolved Mysteries" -- was like a low-pitched hum growing gradually louder until its intrusion could not be ignored. The missing-girl hysteria of the summer of 2002 surely was (as critic Daniel Mendelsohn observed in the New York Review of Books) a displaced response to the even less fathomable losses of the previous September, and "The Lovely Bones" was its made-to-order balm.
Albom writes the kind of book that does well no matter what the historical moment or mood. Ordinarily, book reviewers and other people who consider themselves literary don't read them. When we do, as occasionally happens with superhits like "The Celestine Prophecy," it usually ends in our colleagues being subjected to cranky diatribes about the shocking state of American literacy. In her new memoir, "So Many Books, So Little Time" (an account of 52 books read in the course of a year), Sara Nelson describes picking up Albom's "Tuesdays With Morrie," hoping that she'd be able to commiserate about such snobbishness with the friend who recommended it. No such luck. She figures the book for "a cynical attempt to cash in on the spiritual self-improvement movement" in which, improbably, "a middle class, 40-something, Brandeis-educated writer had to travel weekly across the country to learn the kinds of rules that were posted on [her son's] kindergarten classroom wall."
So the biggest surprise of "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" is how, without actually being good, it manages to be not as bad as you expect. The book is, it must be said, a little nugget of impacted platitudes, but except for a lot of one-line paragraphs, the writing is unaffected and concrete. Albom's intention, to show the worth in the life of an ordinary workingman, seems honorable enough, especially when you consider the kind of high-powered businessmen and overextended working moms who usually figure in this sort of writing. The book might actually encourage some of the people who read it to think about someone who isn't much like themselves, though that might be too much to hope. However, like the animatronic Abraham Lincoln on display at the Hall of Presidents in Disneyland, this novel is fundamentally ersatz, less something you can feel good about than an eerie and not entirely convincing reproduction of something you can feel good about.
"The Five People You Meet in Heaven" describes the afterlife of Eddie, a man too humble, it seems, to merit a last name. He has worked as a maintenance guy at the same boardwalk amusement park for most of his 83 years, and dies trying to save a little girl (naturally) from a plummeting roller-coaster car. Once dead, he is whisked through a series of semi-corporeal tableaux in which he meets five individuals who -- mirabile dictu! -- have five very important lessons to convey to him. I know the suspense is probably killing you, so here are the lessons: 1) We're all connected; 2) sacrifice is an important part of life; 3) anger will eat you up from the inside; 4) life has to end, but love doesn't; and 5) well, this last one isn't that clear because the designated person doesn't speak very good English, but my guess is that it's something along the lines of: There's a reason for everything that happens to you.
It's debatable whether, having been told this, you have much cause to read Albom's book. Agreeably written as it is, the novel is less a work of art or even of craftsmanship than it is a delivery system for those five lessons. Most readers, if they're honest, will admit that they hope to learn something from literature. But art -- or even, for that matter, excellent entertainment -- has another aspect to it that makes it more precious to us than utilitarian texts like instruction manuals and lists of the city's best restaurants. A great book (let's say "Great Expectations") does teach us something (about the futility of longing for what we can't have, in the case of Dickens' masterpiece), but it also exists for its own sake. What's good about it inheres in what it is.
Eddie's experiences in heaven have the purpose of explaining to him the purpose of his life on earth. He died thinking that his 83 years were something of a waste: His "plans never worked out," his beloved wife dies young and childless and he works the same job that his unaffectionate and sometimes violent father held before him. "This is the greatest gift God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. To have it explained," says one of Eddie's posthumous teachers. That explanation ultimately lies in the novel's final encounter, in which what Eddie thought of as squandered years and labor are revealed to be compensation for an injury he didn't realize he'd committed.
