The Shack, by William P. Young

So I looked up The Shack on Wikipedia to see how many copies have been sold and saw a helpful link at the top reminding me that this was not the page for the rebranding of RadioShack. Is RadioShack seriously trying to call itself The Shack these days? Like it’s a cool place for people to go hang out? That’s almost as funny as chapter 11 in The Shack—a bestselling Christian novel whose tag line is “Where tragedy meets eternity”—which is titled, I’m not kidding, “Here Come da Judge.”

Now okay, the actual thoughts in The Shack are far more palatable than those in most Christian books. The authors’ intent was to open up people’s ideas of God and faith past those put forth by contemporary evangelical Christianity, and return to the image of God put forth in the New Testament: a huge, unknowable, cryptic, obliquely but explicitly loving figure who doesn’t care so much about rules. Coming from my Texas mega-church background, I think that’s great; I’m generally pretty bothered by the socialized aspects of Christianity and I was personally satisfied to read the parts where Jesus says things like “I don’t create institutions” and “A lot of what is done in my name has nothing to do with me, and is often, even if unintentional, very contrary to my purposes” and particularly where he says “Those who love me have come from every system that exists. They were Buddhists or Mormons, Baptists or Muslims… I have no desire to make them Christian.” Of course, these are the parts of the book that have apparently made The Shack controversial, but I think these ideas are extremely reasonable.

However, slightly less than reasonable: pretty much everything else about the book. One of the collaborators, defending the controversy, said in an interview, “Art is incredibly subjective as to whether a story and style are appealing.” I actually giggled reading that because… art? The story of this book is that a broken man inundated with what he calls The Great Sadness (which is always capitalized and italicized) receives a note in his mailbox from “Papa” (God) instructing him to go to the shack where his daughter was murdered, which magically turns into a Narnia land of flowers and mountains where God awaits in the form of a big black lady named Elouisa, Jesus in the form of an ugly Middle-Eastern man, and the Holy Spirit as a crazy hippie Nepalese woman named Sarayu. The narrator is the sort of dad-jeans wearing guy who says things like “That’s just too cute” and prays with people he meets on camping trips, and there are many sentences such as “This was not that!” and “Looking at her through blurring tears, he could see that her smile was radiant.”

Art, this is not. I also think the sort of affirmative action at work in this book is more than a little tacky—we are frequently reminded that all the God figures, including God’s Wisdom personified in a Hispanic woman named Sophia, are so shockingly and crazily not white. I mean, it’s pretty undeniable that the historical Jesus would have been ripped apart by TSA airport scans, and are people honestly stupid enough to still think of God as a huge white dude who fixes your shit, like an out-of-costume Santa Claus? But I guess the reason why The Shack has sold about a billion copies and “changed people’s lives” is that people probably do still think like that. Well, we’ll all be smacked with reason eventually. Here Come da Judge.

Eat Pray Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert

From the book jacket: “In her early thirties, Elizabeth Gilbert had everything a modern American woman was supposed to want, but instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she felt consumed by panic and confusion. This wise and rapturous book is the story of how she left behind all these outward marks of success, and what she found in their place… pleasure in Italy, devotion in India, and on the Indonesian island of Bali, a balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence.”

Obviously I hate this book. Obviously. Aside from the fact that it has reached such a wide audience by dint of the author’s extreme self-involvement and confessional, silly-best-friend-at-Starbucks tone–and the fact that, because the ideas of Other Countries and Spirituality and Pleasure are central, most of these readers are deceived into thinking the book is indeed “wise and rapturous”–AND the fact that apparently there’s a Florence and the Machine song in the trailer for the movie, which my boyfriend told me just because he knew I would be enraged–bottom line is that this book is just so fucking lame. It kills me.

Let me say, I have never had any patience for problems of privilege. To read about “the fallout of a postfeminist American career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful and alienating urban world,” and to try to muster sympathy for the fact that she tried everything from vegetarianism to therapy to special underwear to balance her chakras and oh, the horror, nothing worked–I just couldn’t possibly give a shit. I know that sadness is sadness, and I’m sure Elizabeth Gilbert’s divorce was very hard for her, but she’s a lucky motherfucker and rather than take this year-long pleasure cruise through making herself a better person, she should’ve just taken up residence in an American homeless shelter or perhaps joined the Peace Corps. Boom: an attitude adjustment requiring no sentences as irritating as “Here’s what’s strange, though. I haven’t seemed to be able to do any Yoga since getting to Rome.” She’s so dramatic about her day-to-day thought process throughout the entire book that she seems for the most part completely oblivious to the fact that any kind of (healthy) treatment for depression is off-limits to the vast majority of the world.

But of course, she could have just medicated herself extensively and become a wobbly, dependent, and even more superficial person, so Elizabeth Gilbert’s hunt for happiness/self-esteem/God isn’t so bad. It is a completely entertaining book to read. I appreciate that she put antidepressants in their place, stating that they worked for her only because she worked just as hard as they did to help herself recover. I appreciate that she traveled at all and I appreciate that she genuinely tried to follow the ritual meditation practices at her Indian ashram–despite the fact that in this attempt to find perspective, she never left it. I don’t doubt that Elizabeth Gilbert is a good and thoughtful person, and I suppose she couldn’t have gotten a best-selling book and a movie out of a jaunt into the slums of Mumbai.

As usual, there is a certain element of thoughtlessness in my reaction to this book. I have never found it difficult to locate the practical in the ideas of happiness and God, and maybe it’s out of pure conceitedness that I think self-esteem problems–no matter how real–are a waste of time. But I’m sick of extravagant solutions for problems that grow out of too much money and not enough purpose. My usual treatment for sadness and confusion–do some work, roll a joint, and imagine for a second that I have cystic acne and no legs–is cheaper, less public, and it’s working just fine for me.

The Rule of Four, by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason

The Rule of Four is supposed to be a well-written version of the Da Vinci Code. This to me sounds extremely unappealing, but I get it–we like Dexter and Law and Order and Sudoku and all those things that allow us to “use our minds” without using them. This novel has been translated into 25 languages and in 2007 was the best-selling debut of the decade up to the point. Unfortunately, it’s super, super boring.

Before this becomes rude, I should say that it’s not horrible. You get the sense that these authors are probably aware of the things that denote good literature (where it appears to me that Dan Brown spent his formative literary period watching Nicolas Cage movies). But to be frank, my threshold for boring has sunk pretty low. These days, I can spend a fascinating two hours detailing my eyebrows. So the fact that this book made time slow down to a maple-syrup pace–not good.

The Rule of Four is about a book called the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Here is a nice sample of two sentences to start: “For it wasn’t the seals that would undo Rodrigo and Donato. It was the heavy black wax in which those seals had been pressed.” The series of riddles at the center of the story concern, naturally, a history-changing secret (I’ll give the authors credit that they didn’t try to set their stakes quite as high, and had the decency to leave Jesus and secret societies out of this), an “ingenious” code buried within this Renaissance text, some murders, and the inner workings of Princeton–this last being by far the most boring aspect of the book. At one point the narrator freaks out, with mixed metaphors, about a tradition where a bunch of sophomores streak in the snow (“Mere thoughts of the Nude Olympics usually lights a fire under the cold months of college, but this year, with Katie’s turn coming around, I’m more interested in keeping the home fires burning.”) I read that and I was like, bitch would’ve had an aneurysm at UVA.

The New York Times Book Review called this “the ultimate puzzle book.” I’ll admit that maybe I was too impatient to get into it, or too bored to try very hard, but that’s the book’s fault. Like I said, I’ve got a good attention span. To me this book’s most puzzle-like aspect was the fact that these authors completely lack the ability to combine words and spatial logic. Every time they describe a room, a building, a path, or kind of anything that has to do with space and direction–and there was a lot of that, considering that this was a mystery plot set at Princeton–I got the semi-pissed feeling that I used to get in level 9 of Tetris, like, I have no room for all this bullshit that doesn’t fit together and I’m trying my best, goddammit!

Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen

I had noticed this book popping up as required reading for some of the high schoolers that I tutored this fall–and they all grunted “It’s all right” in response to my asking how it was, which was a considerable step above the usual “Dunno, I thought you would have read it Jia”–so I felt favorably towards this little guy. It’s about the circus, which is cool, and it’s a bestseller. But then I looked it up and saw that Sara Gruen wrote it as part of National Novel Writing Month, something which I have ill feelings towards, and then saw that there’s an upcoming movie adaptation starring Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon, which is just… unfortunate. And then I read it. And then it sucked.

I will proceed in “negative sandwich” form–positive, negative, positive–the Peace Corps-approved method for giving any sort of criticism. Pretty much any person who has ever gone through school, rush, voting, debate, or life of any sort will automatically give feedback like this and probably not have to give it a silly name. Except for me when I write book reviews, and the format basically goes–bullshit, bullshit, three sentences about the book. Sorry.

Positive about Water for Elephants: there must have been a lot of awesome research that went into this book. Depression-era circuses, interesting for sure. Negative: I’d a thousand times rather read the research than read this book. Positive: there are a few great pictures at the end of really cute girls in circus costumes.

Positive: this book is long but not boring. Negative: this book has not a stitch of original writing in it. Positive: this is a good book for people who read bad books or no books, and who are unnerved by original writing anyway.

Well, I’m out of positives, so I’ll just leave you with a taste of the skills of Sara Gruen. This is literally the first paragraph I saw upon reopening the book. “Her throat is delicate, her shoulders square. A few curls of light brown hair peek from beneath the brim of her hat. She kneels on a cushion to pray, and a vice grip tightens around my heart. I retreat from the church before I can further damage my soul.”

Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer

You know that part in “Just A Friend” where Biz Markie is like “Don’t gimme that–don’t even gimme that!” That’s what my head is like whenever I think about Into the Wild. There’s just no other way to put it. Don’t even give me that, Jon Krakauer. Don’t even give me that, stupid Into the Wild movie starring yellow typeface, Jena Malone’s sad voice, and Sean Penn’s bloated, invisible chode. And really, really, really don’t give me that, Christopher McCandless. I am truly sorry that you couldn’t find purpose in your everyday life, and that your restlessness led you to embark on a series of events that ended up in your weighing 67 pounds when you died alone in the Alaskan wilderness.

But I am not sorry, because if ever there was a problem that someone brought on himself, this is it.

Here’s the thing. A lot of people like Into the Wild. It’s like a Knowles trip + Burning Man + whatever vague streak of misguided white bourgeois fuck-the-machine attitude that leads rich college students to wear TOMS and secretly think incense is sexy. And I mean, I’m doing the Peace Corps, so like, I’m down with the outdoors, and people doing weird things, and I like isolation and faux-Thoreau as much as the next guy and probably a good amount more. But Christopher McCandless, his story just makes me angry. “[Although he] possessed a streak of stubborn idealism that did not readily mesh with the realities of modern life, he was no psychopath. McCandless was in fact an honors graduate of Emory University, an accomplished athlete, and a veteran of several solo excursions into wild, inhospitable terrain.”

And so what does a Phi Beta Kappa college graduate with $25,000 of his parents’ money in the bank do to deal with his heartbreakingly strong idealism? He gave the money away and peaced out in his Datsun, “relieved to shed a life of abstraction and security, a life he felt was removed from the heat and throb of the real world. Chris McCandless intended to invent a new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experience.” He renames himself Alexander Supertramp, gives away his food, and starves himself slowly in an abandoned bus. What a waste of resources. What a stupid tale to fascinate people. Couldn’t he just have done a bunch of acid and/or volunteered at a homeless shelter? Either of those experiences would have been pretty “unfiltered,” yeah?

Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

I’m pissed about this David Oliver Relin character, the co-writer (minus the co) of this book. He got a fellowship from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, he got a Michener Fellowship to bike across Vietnam, and he apparently wins tons of awards and affects major global issues on a regular basis. He is incredibly successful and clearly brilliant at getting the job done; he is living a life that I dream about, but he is not a good writer. I found this book super arduous to read, and it shouldn’t be. The story itself, about Greg Mortenson’s crazy, selfless, bottomed-out effort to build a school in a remote part of northern Pakistan, is tremendous. But Relin’s journalism is a Zamboni machine of sorts, moving slower than the action, rolling over the defined edges of a complicated story with a thick, slightly unpleasant layer of lowest common denominator. Honestly every other sentence is like, “Greg Mortenson knew that everyone thought he was crazy. This mission was hopeless, futile, a Berkeley dreamer’s castle in the clouds. But he had six bucks in his pocket and a heart of steel. And although all was lost, and he was friendless, and he hadn’t showered for six months, he got on Yorba the camel and whispered, ‘Let’s go.’”

My mother gave me this book for my birthday, to put forth some sort of “Hey, I support your stupid idea to go teach in a country that ends in -stan” message. But this is nothing like what I’ll be doing in the Peace Corps. Greg Mortenson’s story is at least a thousand times more awesome than anything I could imagine (he’s built 131 schools so far). And I resent that it, like The Kite Runner, has been made into a soft-focus episode of Touched by an Angel. When these stories are covered with Sympathy Syrup, it makes people feel like they’ve done something just by reading them. Like they’ll nod, furrowing their eyebrows, and say things like, “It really changes the way you see the world.” But it doesn’t. These stories shouldn’t make people feel good. They should be fucking bullets to the conscience, not Xanax-flavored chai.

The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

Catcher in the Rye is in the top 25 of books listed most often as Facebook favorites. A dubious honor, for sure, considering that the rest of the list is quite heavy on tomes like The Shack and company, but I say this to remind us of the particular place that Catcher in the Rye holds in society. It’s sort of a cultural shortcut, a fifties Donnie Darko, connoting vague hipsterdom with a dash of pleasant immaturity, signifying to anyone who’s watching that the people who like Catcher are themselves complicated and brooding, with a chunk of Holden Caulfield stuck in their pre-jaded hearts. It’s sort of like that Absinthe Robette poster: meant to signify a big nebulous cloud of things that hopefully all fall under “interesting.” Only Urban Outfitters doesn’t sell the Absinthe Robette poster. It sells the Catcher cover art, though–see what I mean?

As for the book itself, I mean, it’s fine. One of those books I was very happy reading through the first time but never wanted to read again. Still, everyone should probably read it, because for one reason or another, Catcher has become some truly seminal whining. And it really grips people: besides inspiring budding hipsters, it apparently also inspired a lot of assassination attempts. Which is crazy, because a lot of things that future killers get obsessed with–like Oldboy, which inspired the Virginia Tech shooter–are so absolutely brimming with rage, where Catcher in the Rye instead brims with decently funny, poignant, low-level Eeyoring, like “You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write ‘Fuck You’ right under your nose.”

I guess the reason why I’ve never quite taken to this book is that Holden Caulfield is a cowardly outlaw: he wants to be brave, and his inner monologue is brave, but in reality he is a half-drunk bruise who can’t make decisions. Self-consciousness needs to go somewhere, and I think that’s why I like Franny and Zooey better than Catcher.

Old Shit, by the Educational Testing Service

Okay, the reason why I haven’t been writing for awhile is because I am packing my brain with nonsense for the upcoming GRE literature subject test. Upcoming as in this time next week. I have only been studying for about a week, and clearly I am not actually studying right now (or ever), as rather than perusing the Norton I am writing this, looking up places in London I can buy a tutu, and wondering whether to paint my nails firehouse red or classy purple.

I expect to do not-so-well on this test, considering most of the questions consist of them giving you three lines from a poem and asking who wrote it, or giving you a line of Old English and asking you to translate it and identify the past participle. But it’s now or never because these scores last for five years and by next November I’ll only be speaking Kyrgyz. So I need to buckle in, take the goddamn train to Leeds this Friday, and pretend I’m having fun. Which I am. With everything written after 1900. But as far as the old shit goes, these are my essential takeaways:

Greek mythology: loves it. To have gods and goddesses who acted not like Blue-Eyed Misogynist Jesus but like Genghis Khan, Clinton and Angelina Jolie–no wonder the Greeks had it together. Seriously, I could read this stuff for ages. Fire, murder, chariots, babies coming out of heads. Amazing. Danae!

Keats, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley: KILL ME. If you’re not in some sort of emo trance, it is honestly very difficult to read this stuff in 2009 and not glaze over. It’s “gorgeous” and “important” and I understand that British Romantic poetry really is gorgeous and important, but reading this stuff is like drinking a rotten milkshake made of velvet, peat moss, and 200-year-old roses.

Restoration comedy: William Wycherley: The Country Wife (1675). Featuring Mr. Horner, Mr. Pinchwife, Sir Jasper Fidget, Mrs. Squeamish, and Mrs. Dainty Fidget. Don’t even tell me that I need to know that. Don’t even tell me.

Pilgrim’s Progress: Most hilarious thing ever. It’s just so impossible to misinterpret. Also I’ve always wanted to write a college version of this. Instead of Christian trying to get to the Celestial City and getting bogged down in the Slough of Despond, it would be Freshman, meeting his friends Slutty and Soc Major and getting sidetracked to Fraternity Row, where he encounters a demon named DUI, gets thrown in the Drunk Tank, and is afterwards given guidance by the Dean of Students. With woodcut illustrations I think I’d really have something… something about as good as Pilgrim’s Progress.

James Joyce: I understand very little of this man’s oeuvre. Outside of Portrait of the Artist–which I think is an incredibly unteachable book for high-schoolers, largely because I don’t think a huge number of high school English teachers are willing to be up to the task of teaching this–I struggled through Dubliners, I couldn’t finish Ulysses and I couldn’t even start Finnegan’s Wake. What moments of illumination I have had with Joyce constitute the bulk of my impression of what it would be like to be an idiot savant.

In many ways I appreciate having to read all of this, but mostly I think that culture has thinned out to the point where it would be more relevant to test this, from McSweeney’s: YouTube Comment or e.e. cummings?

The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand

I absolutely hate Ayn Rand. I abhor her. And if you like her–and I understand that many intelligent people go through or have gone through a die-hard Ayn phase, in much the same way that in fourth grade I couldn’t stop listening to “C’est La Vie” by B*Witched–either stop reading or please forgive me for this forthcoming stream of bile.

From the horse’s mouth: “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” That sounds fine, right? Definitely fine if you live in an imaginary capitalist snowglobe, where everyone is Patrick Bateman, injustice and hegemony have never existed, and sanitation and social work are done by robots, thus leaving the real people free to build skyscrapers and have lofty (heterosexual) sex. And to be honest, that kind of sounds like an awesome world, I’ll admit it. Perhaps the reason why I hate Ayn Rand so much is that she, like the best kind of devil, tells enticing half-truths. I too can be delusional and selfish, just like Ayn and her followers, and of course I would love to live in this hallucinated Gotham of flawless individuals. But I am not as delusional as Ayn. I know when my jeans won’t button, unlike Ayn, who would have loved to forget that she was really a short Russian Jew named Alisa Rosenbaum, bearing little resemblance to patrician, ideal Dominique Francon in The Fountainhead. And certainly, she was selfish.

But of course, to her, “selfish” is a positive word, meaning staying true to yourself despite the views of others. This is a crucial tenet of her philosophy, although it also sounds like a priggish excuse best usable by a spouse caught in an affair–”It has nothing to do with you! I was just staying true to myself!” etc. The fact that this comparison (between central philosophy and doghouse blather) is so easily made is just one of the reasons why objectivism is a morally bankrupt, dilettantish, and fucking stupid way of thinking. People like it because it is the philosophical equivalent of college: a potentially meaningful but incredibly misused scaffolding that enables people to think, “Bitch, I do what I want.” 

But the gender stuff is the worst. “The essence of femininity is hero worship—the desire to look up to man,” she says. “An ideal woman is a man-worshiper, and an ideal man is the highest symbol of mankind.” And I understand that she’s saying that the man has to be worthy or ideal before any of this is true, and, being straight, I can even get down with the idea that a woman “experiences the essence of her femininity” while surrendering (sexually) to a man “worthy” of dominating her. But no ma’am. She taps into a well of dangerous, complicated cultural undercurrents with this thought, which is anything but objective.

Ayn Rand undermines awareness and good sense just as much as all those evangelical Christian books that tell boys to hunt and girls to think they’re princesses. I am upset now. I need a cookie.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s, by Truman Capote

So clearly I am frequently that little shit who can be overheard saying, “I mean, the movie doesn’t even compare to the book, but I guess for people who haven’t read it yet, the movie is okay…”

But with this one it’s the opposite. Give me Audrey and her stupid cigarette holder over Truman Capote and his extreme realism. And I mean, extreme: In Cold Blood is a “nonfiction novel,” and in his other stuff I find myself getting really upset just thinking of one man inventing so much ordinariness, and although Norman Mailer called him the most perfect writer of the generation after Breakfast at Tiffany’s came out, I just can’t deal. This is the kind of bland, journalistic mid-century realism that–to me–seems to elide absolutely everything that the genius nineteenth-century realists were able to bring out of the simple, terrifying original idea of writing things as they are. Balzac created a universe; in contrast, Capote is the guy on the train who’s on the phone telling his mom what he ate for breakfast. Yes, I know it’s not really the same thing. I don’t care, though. I guess I just find Capote super boring, and I rarely find things boring.

I think all this crankiness is brought on by the fact that I’m realizing I vastly prefer the movie to the book, and I don’t even like the movie very much. In fact, I hate Holly Golightly as a character, and the sort of delusional, glam, urban, faux-wanton archetype she has unleashed upon American females. She is gorgeous and fascinating, and I get it–but like, I refuse to be drawn to someone who can’t get their shit together. “I discovered,” says Capote’s narrator on page 16, “that her regular reading consisted of tabloids and traveel folders and astrological charts; that she smoked an esoteric cigarette called Picayunes; survived on cottage cheese and melba toast… she received letters by the bale. They were always torn into strips like bookmarks. Remember and miss you and rain and please write and goddamn were the words that reoccurred…”

Oh, come on. I’d rather listen to that Deep Blue Something song than read about a girl who only eats melba toast.