Bossypants, by Tina Fey

I’m not big on role models, but I suspect that I’m highly typical among outspoken females in counting Tina Fey as one of mine (if you’re curious, the complete list includes Maeby Funke, Amanda Blank at 4:04 of that song, and… cannot think of any more). I’ve been a big-time fan of Miz Fey’s ever since I bought this fat history of SNL in 2002, and even more so since I found out that she was part of the lovingly, painfully nerd-face theater group I was lucky enough to partake in at UVA. So obviously I pre-ordered her book and signed up for Amazon Prime just to get the free two-day shipping so that this book could arrive yesterday and I could spend an unsatisfyingly short three hours in bed devouring it. I laughed out loud in an empty room about twenty times. Bossypants is funny, perceptive, and perfectly self-deprecating–exactly what you’d expect from one of the few current female celebrities famous for being talented rather than going to the gym a lot. Some critics have been complaining that it’s not quite a memoir and that it lacks some expected juicily emotional depth, but to me that’s why this book was so enjoyable: it’s about work, it’s not gratuitous, it’s there to tell you the things about Tina Fey’s life that are 1) funny and 2) actually interesting, and it’s not there for anything else.

Slate called Tina Fey’s attitude “tough girl feminism“–the kind where someone yells “Nice tits” and you yell back “Suck my dick”–and this is so agreeable to my mode of operation that I’m having a hard time imagining what else you’d do in that situation. As Mick Foley said on Fox News, the world may get an F with women, but we’re getting a C-minus and bragging about it; what else can you do with that other than take no shit and use the language of the shitters? Fey talks about being at a seminar with 200 women who were all asked to pinpoint the moment where they first “knew they were a woman.” Nearly all of them talked about the first time they were harassed, which rings true to the time I was at evangelical Baptist camp when I was eleven and some thirteen-year-old suggested I stick whatever I was holding “in my pussy.” On a semi-related note, I’m not sure too many men would buy this book, because it’s a lot more frankly feminist than everything else that will sell over 10,000 copies, but they should, because it’s funny. And anyway if Tina Fey’s very reasonable gender-equality slant is too much, then we really in trouble.

Some highlights from Bossypants:

On how beauty ideals have diversified admirably since the 70′s, with JLo bringing the butt and Beyonce the “leg meat”: “And from that day forward, women embraced their diversity and realized that all shapes and sizes are beautiful. Ah ha ha. No. I’m totally messing with you. All Beyonce and JLo have done is add to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful. Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes.”

Responding to an Internet bodybuilding forum where someone posted “I’d stick it in her tail pipe”: “Thank you so much for your interest! Whether you meant it in a sexual way or merely as an act of aggression, I am grateful. As a ‘woman of a certain age’ in this business, I feel incredibly lucky to still be ‘catching your eye’ ‘with my anus.’ You keep me relevant!”

About this UVA douche bag who invites her on a mountain hike just to talk to her about another girl the whole way: “He had to stop and smile at the adorableness of this–Gretchen had asked him to tear the piece of Trident in half because it was too big for her. ‘Can you believe that?’ he marveled. A girl so feminine and perfect that half a piece of Trident was the most she could handle. I tried to process what this meant for my evening. ‘So… you and I will not be dry humping, then?’… As I crawled into my bottom bunk, I thought about how I had climbed Old Rag. I thought about Gretchen, the girl who could only accommodate half a piece of gum. ‘I hope you marry her,’ I imagined saying to HRW, ‘and I hope she turns out to have a cavernous vagina.”

Little Earthquakes, by Jennifer Weiner

First of all, I couldn’t possibly overstate the importance of Little Earthquakes (not this book, the Tori Amos album) in my fifth-grade emotional development. I wrote out the lyrics in glitter pen and stared at them while pondering my heart as an impossible cyclone of bittersweet, abstract longing. You too can experience this feeling by watching this YouTube video of the PS22 kids doing “1000 Oceans.” I’m not even embarrassed to admit this, because that album was good.

Anyway, I’m steadily chipping away at my credibility as a person whose blog you should read–but in pursuit of absolutely nothing, I’ll press on. Jennifer Weiner sells a lot of books and In Her Shoes was made into a Cameron Diaz movie so I figured she was worth checking out–and, well, this book is fine. It’s nowhere near as superficial as Lauren Weisberger’s mind-polluting social climber oeuvre, and it details the lives of normal, intelligent working women (with a basketball player’s wife and an ex-celebrity actress thrown in for the always necessary glam-factor). The book is about pregnancy and money and babies and whatever–a bunch of “women things” that will eventually be important to me but will hopefully never be important enough to make me think that every little detail related to said “women things” is automatically interesting.

Jennifer Weiner has vehemently defended the idea of chick lit before–”Female protagonist, urban setting, smart, sarcastic voice. I don’t see why it matters if you’re thrown into this category,” she says in one interview. I realized after reading this book that that’s not my problem with chick lit (and really, that definition is missing a crucial “who thinks about only herself” clause after the female protagonist part). What bothers me about chick lit is the way it makes women–occasionally including myself–glom onto the minutae of someone’s feminine exploits in the vague hope that the accumulation of details will eventually provide some sort of key to understanding (and perhaps also magically transforming) their own lives. I get a feeling that this is a big reason why, for women, every single relationship story seems individual and fascinating; why else would people continue to watch the Bachelor, which is the same every season as well as every episode? Sure, it’s entertaining to watch girls put on tiny dresses and act sincere for some man who probably not only shaves but also airbrush-tans his chest–but there’s a more than a little of “If I see enough love stories, I’ll figure out my own” in the viewership. And, since we assume that the love story is complete once everyone’s partaken of tiny truffle mac-and-cheese bowls at the wedding, this phenomenon can be assumed to go even farther–to a world where stretch marks replace high heels, but the need for shared attention is the same. There are 3.9 million mommy bloggers out there.

When I brought this up with my boyfriend, he said that the energy that women put into this sort of endless, life-normalizing support group behavior is the energy that men put into sports and misogyny. This strikes me as a good assessment, and I don’t mean to imply that either gender has a lock on narrow, superficial fixations. He also said that most people of both genders don’t even see the attraction of not being superficial, which is a chilling (but probably decently accurate) thought. And women may be the primary audience for anodyne, internal-affairs chicky business, but they also make up 80% of the fiction market–so there’s that. Don’t get me wrong with all of this! I think women comprise the better half of the world by a long shot. I just think they (we) are getting fooled by chick lit and everything like it.

The fact is: these stories about women in whatever form have a legitimate veneer of insight on the female experience, but in reality are creating a false idea that a woman’s life has to revolve around an anti-intellectual beehive of relationships, shoes and status; that a woman’s emotional state is something akin to how I conceived it in fifth grade while listening to the other Little Earthquakes–something important, absorptive, and worth hours of daily maintenance and attention. Jennifer Weiner’s Little Earthquakes, despite being very well-written for its genre, was about as insightful as a cocktail napkin with a saying on it.

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

You probably know what this book is about even if you haven’t read it, since it’s been on at the top of the bestseller lists for about a hundred weeks. But if you don’t, The Help is a story about the black maids of civil rights-era Jackson, Mississippi, and the white woman who decides to write a controversial book about their lives. That sentence is boring, right? That’s because you can read it and instantly know exactly what you’re going to get from this book: aging white debutantes who care only about appearance and the Junior League; black maids who run the ever-nuanced Black Woman in the South gamut from saintly to sassy. Now, I think The Help is a relatively well-written book about a subject that’s tricky to portray, and it’s a pleasure to read: great plot, lively, with a note of unexpectedness that keeps it out of Oprah territory. But unless you’re a sort of unwitting racist type and it helps you come to the revelation that yes, white people have (in general) historically been very cruel to those “beneath” them–The Help is really not as insightful or important as people seem to find it.

Kathryn Stockett, who is herself white (a fact that becomes pretty obvious as soon as you start reading), wrote this book out of guilt and affection for the black woman who raised her as a child in Jackson. She’s great at writing from the perspective of Skeeter, the awkward and mildly subversive white girl (who is repeatedly described as not-cute in the book but is obviously going to be played by Emma Stone in the movie version). Considering the touchiness of what she’s trying to do, she’s not too bad writing as either of her two black narrators, who were originally intended to be the only narrators before Stockett decided it was too weird.

But as a Duke professor asked, “Who gets to tell these stories in a way that they earn public attention?” We trust the filter of a white female author; we’re comfortable with the fact that she writes the black characters in dialect, while the white characters’ accents were probably just as strong. There’s a significant, subconscious current of nostalgia in the writing, and I suspect there’s a bit of old-South nostalgia in the reading of it too. But also, no one said that every book involving black people has to be Invisible Man. So kudos to Kathryn Stockett here for attempting to write about something real. I can overlook tacky earth-mama sentences like “Truth. It feels cool, like water washing over my sticky-hot body. Cooling a heat that’s been burning me up all my life” for that.

Forever, by Judy Blume

Like every other half-assedly “creative” type who would really love to write a masterpiece (or something publishable) but in reality gets distracted by shiny objects and dark beers too often to ever amount to anything, I come to most of my “writing ideas” already preparing to shut them down.

Still, I’ve gone through phases where I briefly got behind a lengthy project: a literary novel about an evangelical camping trip where the sun never comes up, the chick-lit novel that got stolen, a series of travel essays that were also pilfered by some anonymous Kyrgyz dick. I’ve toyed with the idea of gimmick-authorship, doing something stupid for a year and writing about it (although saying yes to every guy who asks you out and abstaining from toilet paper and elevators is out, I think I could make My Year Stalking Junot Diaz into a real charmer). There’s also the possibility of writing a heinously bourgeois nonfiction niche-history, like Salt: A World History or Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World. I threw a legitimate tantrum a few weeks before my college thesis was due because I realized that writing about all-homosexual beauty pageants in the Byzantine Empire would have been just as obscure and stupid, but much, much easier.

But it’s that time again where I feel my creative-fertility clock ticking and want to start something for real. To get things going, I was making a mental list of books that have influenced me, and under the “scary” category was Forever by Judy Blume, which I read as a seven-year-old and then instantly decided that I was going to be repelled by sex forever.

This book, like all of Judy Blume’s, has been banned repeatedly for its frank discussion of teenage sexuality. It’s technically about a girl losing her virginity while in a relationship she thinks is “forever” (she actually ends up being the one who moves on)–but really, it’s about how fucking gross it is to name your penis Ralph. That’s what her boyfriend does. He names it Ralph. Ever since this book was published in 1975, the name Ralph has fallen completely off the radar. No young person wants to look at her child and think about this:

‘Don’t,’ he said, wiggling out of his pajama bottoms. He led my hand to his penis. ‘Katherine . . . I’d like you to meet Ralph . . . Ralph, this is Katherine. She’s a very good friend of mine.’

Then later, after he comes and it gets on her: ‘That’s all right . . . I don’t mind . . .’ I pulled out some tissues.

He took the box back. ‘I’m glad,’ he said, wiping up his stomach. I kissed the mole on the side of his face. ‘Did I do okay . . . considering my lack of experience?’

He laughed, then just put his arms around me. ‘You did just fine . . . Ralph liked it a lot.’

Sick nasty. Which brings me to my newest book idea: a compendium of the most awkward and gross sex scenes in literature. Which is to say, pretty much all of them.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle

Do you hear that? Do you? That crunch, that rattling, those explosions–kind of sounds like a thousand books in 8 suitcases being transported from Houston to New York to Moscow to Bishkek to my ghetto-ass village and blowing my children’s minds! In no small part thanks to you guys, the Village Library Project is funded, the hard work completed, and the fun has begun.

 I’m waiting to open it until our bookshelves are built, and my inner librarian will not be content until I have a Kyrgie Decimal System up and running in this bitch, but rest assured there will be a fancy ribbon-cutting ceremony and a communal reading of The Giving Tree and fifty kids screaming “THANKYOUVARYMACH” in a video made for your viewing pleasure. It’s all in the works. However, my kids have been anxious for the unveiling, and so today I had my very first Reading Club, featuring, as our first book, the beloved Eric Carle tome The Very Hungry Caterpillar. They fell in love instantly, a bunch of teenagers experiencing the awe of a four-year-old reading this book for the first time.

 Remember the story? It’s pretty simple. The caterpillar is born in the moonlight, is super hungry, eats through a symphony of beautifully painted foodstuffs. On Saturday he eats a piece of chocolate cake (which my students obviously pronounced “chocolate cock”), one ice-cream cone, one pickle, one slice of Swiss cheese, salami, a lollipop, cherry pie, a sausage, a cupcake, and a slice of watermelon. Then he has a stomachache, eats a green leaf to flush all that shit out, goes into a cocoon, and emerges as a butterfly.

 Reading this I noticed that the Very Hungry Caterpillar probably embodies my life’s ethos better than any other “literary character.” Glut yourself to death and then go into an ascetic cocoon assuming that after you emerge something positive will have happened. Really, if you broaden the analogy farther than my six-year-running personal routine of bourbon overdoses leading to volunteer trips, the Very Hungry Caterpillar may be a great universal advocate for the hackneyed but lovely work-hard-play-hard way of life. Except I suppose he wasn’t so much working as sleeping in a cocoon, and also I guess he played rather than worked first, so maybe the message I really should be seeing here is “Eat so much that you fall asleep for two weeks and when you wake up you’ll be pretty.”

The Witches, by Roald Dahl

So, in choosing which books to bring for the library, I have optimistically included several classics of the 4th-7th grade reading level: lots of Roald Dahl, Lois Lowry, E.L. Konigsberg, and Louis Sachar. I intended to distribute them among English teachers so that they can sharpen their language skills. However, this word-for-word transcript of a conversation from a winter teaching conference should show you why this intention is, to put it mildly, flawed. Keep in mind that teachers who work with Peace Corps volunteers are inherently more motivated than the rest. To set the scene, it’s a session on feedback, with me, my friends Ian and Lola, and 3 Kyrgyz teachers (one of whom, no joke, is named DILDOCON) in a small group. The question on the board: “Were the goal of the session achieved?”

Ian: I think it were.
Lola: So the goal was to give direct feedback and encourage it on a regular basis by creating a comfortable forum between each counterpart-volunteer pair.
Me: (to Kyrgyz teachers) What do you think? Was the goal achieved?
Teacher 1: Much time.
Teacher 2: Higher education, yes?
Me: Yes. What?
Everyone: (Silence).
Teacher 3: Challenges.
Teachers 1 and 2: (Nodding).
Me: What… were… the… goals… of… the… session?
Teachers: (Nodding).
Lola: I think we’re done here.

 So whatever. Eventually some driven, self-studying teacher like my counterpart will read The Witches and renew her love for the English language. Until then, I have tons of awesome shit to reread.

 The Witches is not my favorite Roald Dahl book. However, I like that it gives a little cultural background to Dahl’s ever-present macabre tone–his parents were Norwegian, and aside from the fact that Scandinavian folklore is incredibly chilling and violent, “the Norwegians know all about witches, for Norway, with its black forests and icy mountains, is where the first witches came from.” The story involves a boy being turned into a mouse by a hotel convention of child-killing witches and then him plotting revenge with his cigar-smoking grandma (the quintessential Roald Dahl sentence of “‘What an idea!’ she cried. ‘It’s fantastic! It’s tremendous! You’re a genius, my darling!’” appears unsatisfyingly late in the book, a little more than 2/3 through). Eventually they destroy the witches of England and plot to destroy the witches of the world.

 I think my post-America emotions were making me extremely sappy during this reread, but still, the part of the book I liked best was at the very end. “My darling,” the grandma says, “are you sure you don’t mind being a mouse for the rest of your life?”

 ”‘I don’t mind at all,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.’”

Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White

There are frequent periods when I feel extremely embarrassed about the entire idea of reviewing books, because–there is no other way to put it–it’s just such a bullshitty thing to do. Just reading this sentence on Wikipedia in the Charlotte’s Web entry made me angry: “Seth Lerer, in his book Children’s Literature, finds that Charlotte represents female authorship and creativity, and compares her to other female characters in children’s literature such as Jo March in Little Women and Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden.” Right. And it doesn’t stop. I laughed out loud reading this next sentence: “Nancy Larrick brings to attention the ‘startling note of realism’ in the opening line, ‘Where’s Papa going with that Ax?’”

 Yes, and it’s a secondary level of ridiculous that I’m writing on a blog about other critics and criticizing them for their over-criticism. But I mean, why ruin Charlotte’s Web by analyzing it like you’re in a freshman literature seminar called “On Bullshit”? The book takes place in a barnyard. Charlotte is a spider. Her “female authorship” consists of weaving messages in her web that the rat finds in the dump on ad copy for detergent (“With new radiant action!”). If there’s anything that can be left out of the endlessly reflexive and paranoid critical world, this book should qualify.

 The Web is good just for its own sake, simple and pure, with an illogical and off-kilter sweetness that never gets cloying. Sure, it’s way more sophisticated than I remembered (I just reread it–thanks, library donors) and Wilbur the pig, like all the characters, is delightfully human (“One day just like another,” he groaned)–but really, who cares? I can hear some douchebag voice in my head saying, “Charlotte’s Web is a treatise on the power of words as well as a defense of the sociological predetermination of contemporary American gender relations” and it would be legitimately defensible in the aforesaid freshman seminar, but it would most importantly be a massive waste of time in comparison to just reading the book like a child would… just enjoying it.

The Little Nugget, by P.G. Wodehouse

I wish P.G. Wodehouse, born in 1881, had been born a hundred years later so that we could be best friends and go out drinking all the time. This man, the irrepressible English aristocrat who invented the character Jeeves, whose characters are named things like Oofy Prosser and Pongo Twistleton, and who wrote an entire book just to make fun of A.A. Milne (the creator of Winnie the Pooh) sounds like a good time. I can just picture him destroying his fraternity formals and reading that Foggy Monocle website on his iPhone all the time. In one of his books, he details the six major types of hangovers: The Broken Compass, the Sewing Machine, the Comet, the Atomic, the Cement Mixer and the Gremlin Boogie. The Gremlin Boogie! It’s so funny because you know exactly what he’s talking about. May we all spend our holidays free of this affliction.

More genius generated in the nineteenth century:

“Insidious things (mint juleps). They creep up on you like a baby sister and slide their little hands into yours and the next thing you know the Judge is telling you to pay the clerk of the court $50.”

“The barman recommended a ‘lightning whizzer’, an invention of his own. He said it was what rabbits trained on when they were matched against grizzly bears and there was only one instance on record of the bear having lasted three rounds.”

This stuff is perfect Peace Corps reading and luckily there are a bunch of Wodehouse books lying around in the volunteer collection. I recently read a book of his called The Little Nugget, this prewar boarding school farce about several people’s attempt to kidnap the this Dudley Dursley-type American schoolboy millionaire, whose idiotic doting mother calls him “The Little Nugget”—hilarious—and it distracted me so much that I was barely irritated by my taxi crossing the mountains at 20 km/hour. And although Wodehouse’s plots are formulaic in that they nearly always involve the same elements (country houses, rich relatives, secret agreements, kidnappings, disguises, a smartass butler type, comic romances, etc), his stories are usually intricate and fairly unpredictable. It’s light reading without being mindless, funny without a point. At the very least he’s a really unique writer whose particular thing will never be done better, so he’s worth a try for sure.

The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck

My Kyrgyz counterpart teacher Dinara and I were talking about The Good Earth, which her previous volunteer had given to her—let me remark again that it is truly stunning that Dinara, a former German teacher, self-taught herself enough English at the age of 40 to be able to read The Good Earth—and she kind of wrinkled her nose and said, “Ugh, but this book is so sad, it’s so much like our life here, just peasants and farms and worries. I much prefer Harry Potter.” I’d read The Good Earth a few years ago, but after she said that I decided to reread it and see how similar rural China in 1910 is to rural Kyrgyzstan in 2010. And yeah, it’s pret-ty similar.

“It [childbirth] is over once more. It is only a slave [a girl] this time, not worth mentioning.” One of my first weeks here, I was sitting at dinner when a neighbor walked in and announced that his baby had been born. When he said it was a girl, everyone got clearly and awkwardly disappointed. There’s a solid economic difference between having a girl baby and boy baby here: girls here can’t be “sold” quite like the girls in The Good Earth, but the difference lies mostly in the customs surrounding the selling. Having a boy means eventually acquiring a daughter-in-law, who costs a lot of money, but will have to do all your bitch work for the rest of your life. Having a girl means having to pay for her upbringing and reap no other reward than the dowry, with which you essentially sell her to another family forever. And the grandmas wonder why I laugh so hard when they tell me I’m going to get married in Kyrgyzstan!

Making New Year’s cakes for guests: “These cakes are not for us to eat… we are not rich enough to eat white sugar and lard.” So much of The Good Earth is about the struggle to feed yourself and the social ramifications of having enough to eat when your friends don’t, or having nothing and envying the rich. It is a daily sadness of mine that I have to eat in my room, away from my host siblings, because they’re always hungry—and I know my family sees me as “rich” because I eat breakfast, and have cheese to grate on pasta, and fruit. And despite the fact that I live on about a dollar fifty a day here, I am rich. It is also really astonishing to me how much people here do for the sake of hospitality and the illusion of prosperity: a family will spend literally a quarter of its yearly income on one party, and spend the next two months eating one meal a day.

“He desired suddenly that she should like him as her husband and then he was ashamed.” Village men here, who other than tending to animals usually spend their time squatting on the side of the road taking shots of vodka, do not seem to devote too much time thinking about making themselves appealing. One of my volunteer friends has a local friend who told him, “If I ever thought a girl was getting pleasure out of sex, I’d be disgusted and have to stop.”

I could go on forever but I feel like I’m giving an impression that is contrary to the spirit of this book. The thing is, despite all these stupid systemic problems, the individuals involved here in Kyrgyzstan are not easily put aside as examples—they’re real, unlucky people who don’t have any way out of the situation. The author of The Good Earth, Pearl Buck, was the daughter of two white Presbyterian missionaries who worked in an impoverished area of northern China. She is the only woman other than Toni Morrison to have won the Nobel Prize for literature and I think the most remarkable aspect of this book—the fact that the characters are people before they’re Chinese people, that there’s absolutely no exotic, “Oriental”, tokenizing tone about it—must certainly have come from the fact that Buck grew up as a minority herself, a white girl in China.  This book’s content is way more interesting than its form, but it’s well-written and well-paced and certainly worth a read.

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.