The Shack

written by William P. Young

My niece Melissa passed this book along to me. Generally I avoid the genre of "Christian fiction" because to me, books in this category too often feel too tidy, too scrubbed-clean. But since I was hearing a little bit of buzz about this book, I thought what the heck.

Before I lambast it, let me just say that it is thought-provoking, and I like books that challenge my paradigms and stretch my thinking. This one certainly does that, particularly in how it portrays the trinity. (Spoiler warning!) Suffice to say that if you have never envisioned God the Father as a large, boisterous black woman (think Whoopi Goldberg), this book will probably take you a little off guard.

Nutshell version: a guy named Mack loses his youngest daughter to a horrific child-molesting murderer. Two years later, still grieving, he receives a note in his mailbox, ostensibly from God, inviting him to the shack in the woods where his daughter was killed. He goes there, encounters God in a fantastical otherworldly series of events, and basically goes away healed and restored.

Well, anytime you write a book about God, you're going to offend or agitate somebody, and I think this book does a pretty good job of that. Just take a look at the ratings on Amazon — generally, people give it five stars and gush about it, or they give it one star and condemn it. I guess I'm somewhere in the middle. As far as literary quality, I think it tends toward the low end of the scale. Portions of it are really poorly written and downright cheesey. Many elements of the story seem misplaced and underdeveloped. (If you've read it, think about the weird spirit-lady-being that Mack finds in the cave. Huh? What was that?) By the middle of the book I found myself wishing that whoever did the editing for this book had been far more ruthless.

But anything that shakes the tree a little and gives me a different view of the many facets of God's personality — well, I'm open to that. In fact, I rather like the fact that this book seems to really hone in on the loving, nurturing facets of God's character ... mostly because I think the church universal is a little too uptight for its own good and could use a good dose of love/nurture to counteract the centuries of penance/guilt in which it's been steeped.

Howevah! If you're looking to this book as a source of theological truth, don't. Repeat after me: it is just a fable. Treat it about the same as you would treat Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Take what works for you (there is some good allegory) and leave the rest (there's a lot to leave, trust me).

My biggest complaint about the book actually has nothing to do with the plot or the theme or the writing quality. It's the shameless self-promotion at the end. After finishing the book, you find several pages that urge you to tell all your friends about the book, write positive book reviews about the book, buy multiple copies of the book and give it away to friends, post on online bulletin boards about how great the book is. Please. That, too me, is just slimey.

The Stepford Wives

written by Ira Levin

Now here's a throwback for you! I had always heard of the movie, but had never seen it and never even knew it was based on this little novella. The book was originally published in 1972, during a time when feminism was kind of the up-and-coming thing. But it was a bit before my time so I didn't know too much about it, except that it had something to do with some kind of sinister plot to make all the wives in the town of Stepford think and act the same.

I'm told the book was quite groundbreaking back in the day, because of its not-s0-subtle feminist messages. And even though it's no longer what our present-day culture would consider revolutionary, it is pretty entertaining. Basic plot is, a family moves to the charming town of Stepford, which they are initially quite pleased with, but soon the wife begins to see that all the women are subservient cookie-cutter Mrs. Cleaver types. Additionally, the men essentially run the town and most evenings can be found congregating at the local men's association (which of course excludes women). Uneasy about this, she does some research and finds that a handful of the most influential men have backgrounds in either experimental science or have worked at Disneyland, the acknowledged hub of all things animatronic. Her conclusion is that the men calculatingly do away with their real wives and replace them with lifelike fembots whose functions are pretty much limited to housework and sex.

At times the book is laugh-out-loud funny. The most entertaining element to me, though, was to observe that what was edgy and borderline-conteroversial back in the early seventies actually comes off as a little chauvinist and provincial today. For example, the main character, though she considers herself a feminist, has what we would today consider a very conventional lifestyle: she doesn't work (except that she's somewhat of a hobby-photographer), her husband is the family breadwinner, and she busies herself with taking care of the house and the kids. Sure, she's a little feisty and independent, but even so, she takes part in a fair bit of daytime grocery shopping, ladies' luncheons, and mid-day tennis matches. Not that those are bad things; they just don't fit our present-day definition of feminist. Kind of interesting, I think, to note how our picture of feminism has shifted quite a bit in 30 years.

This is a quick, short book — only 123 pages, and although it doesn't quite fit the description on the back cover ("a masterpiece of psychological suspense"? That's a bit of an overstatement, I think!) it's still kind of a fun read.

Oh, and my favorite line in the book: when the main character is visiting a friend, they're sitting outside next to the friend's pool and "the maid, a slightly gray-haired woman named Nettie, brought them a pitcher of Bloody Marys and a bowl of cucumber dip and crackers." Who knew I'd make a cameo appearance!?