After much internal debate, I decided to stop reading a book before coming to the end of it. I absolutely hate doing that. I usually consider it a mission to finish a book. But this one I ultimately had to put down.
The book is The Shack by Wm. Paul Young. My sister loaned it to me on our trip to Maine earlier this summer—brought it especially for me, in fact, to see what I’d think.
The Shack starts with an absolutely horrifyingly yet spellbinding story about a very tragic thing that happens to a young girl, and then the rest of the book (so far as I’ve read) details how her father, Mack, deals with that tragedy and an earlier tragedy in his life in the context of his relationship with God.
Truth be told, I’m always skeptical of a God story, especially one that comes across preachy and didactic as The Shack does. I understand that many people have found religious inspiration in this book, so I’d like to make it perfectly clear that my intention is not to discount, or to cast judgment on, their experiences. And, while I respect and honor religious choice, I myself am neither Christian nor a church-goer. I understand, too, that there is an ongoing debate over whether this book is considered to be heretical or revelatory. Due to my relative inexperience with Christian theology (aside from a quasi-Christian upbringing to which I no longer ascribe) I don’t consider myself very qualified to speak on the matter. I did, however, find an interesting examination of theological perspectives put forth in the book at the blog, Doxxa.
From a literary perspective, then, I think Young takes an interesting approach in examining Mack’s relationship with God. Mack is invited back to the shack, the scene of his daughter’s presumably atrocious demise, in a cryptic letter that arrives in his mailbox one icy morning. Against all better judgment, he accepts the offer, creates a ruse so that his family won’t know where he’s going, and drives out to the shack once more. There, he is greeted by God the Father in the form of a big African-American woman named Elouisa, Jesus Christ in the form of an olive-skinned Hebrew tradesman, and the Holy Spirit in the form of a small, mystical Asian woman named Sarayu. To portray the trinity in this way is a creative idea, but I find the characterizations so stereotypical as to be offensive. For example, Elouisa speaks a down-home, countrified Ebonics (“We is all that you get,” she tells Mack) that makes me cringe.
After arriving at the shack, Mack has numerous talks with these various aspects of God, and in so doing, starts to come to a better understanding of his relationship with God and the personal growth he needs to make. It was in the midst of these talks that I eventually put down the book, so I don’t know how the story ends.
The sad thing is that I’ve hardly gotten through three books this summer, despite the fact that I am again unemployed. I was so good at book-reading and then blogging my quasi reviews last summer. Was it just a passing phase? Have I been so distracted by other interests? In part, yes. But the other part is that I have been stopped up, plugged in the read-hole by this beast of a book. I ran out of patience for being preached at early on, so once I got to that part, I could only read a few pages of The Shack per sitting. And yet, at the same time, I was so devoted to finishing one book before starting on the next that I didn’t start reading a new book for months. How sad is that?
It is becoming more and more apparent that my sister and I differ markedly on our ideas as to what makes a good book. Her last loaner was Twilight, about which I wrote a bitchy entry earlier this summer. But in light of life experiences, it makes sense to me why The Shack might appeal to her.
Last year, a terrible tragedy befell a family in a neighboring town to my sister’s—four teenagers targeted an isolated house and entered it at 4:00 AM with plans to murder anyone they found inside. They executed their plan upon a woman and child, and while the child survived being stabbed repeatedly, the mother did not. The father was out on a business trip at the time. Although the crime did not occur in my sister’s town, it did occur in a town both close and similar to hers—a small, rural town, the kind of place where people go to get away from big city problems and where almost everybody knows one other. On top of that—and this is the part that frightens me most—one of the teenage perpetrators lived down the street from my sister. Their back yards are connected by a ¼ mile path over a land bridge between two swampy forests; we have walked to the edge of the young man’s family’s property on numerous occasions.
It makes sense to me that when something so horrific strikes so close to home why it would give a person pause to reflect on what he or she would do and feel should something so awful happen to him or her, so this is part of the reason why my sister stayed glued to The Shack “like a train wreck,” she said—because she wanted to see how a person could deal with something so horrible, and because she wanted to understand why this so-called God would “let” something so horrible happen to an innocent child. My sister’s not religious either, but entranced by the book she was.
As for me, on the other hand, putting down The Shack was the most liberating thing I have done in a long time. I am absolutely reveling in the freedom to read other books once more. Thank God for that!
Leave a comment