Books

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.

In this strange, quasi-secular view of the universe, life turns out to be an equation that adds up perfectly, even if we don’t figure it out ourselves until after the end. What life isn’t is something with an irreducible meaning all its own, just as “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” has no real value beyond the inspirational messages it contains. As life-affirming as Albom’s book is meant to be, its effect is the opposite, at least from a humanist point of view, which holds that life and art are ends in themselves. Their sums are more than the total of all their explanations. What perturbs some readers about this kind of book is not just snobbery, but the betrayal of that principle and the creepy emptiness at the heart of such enterprises.

No doubt that opinion would get me stopped at the celestial security checkpoint imagined by Anthony DeStefano in “A Travel Guide to Heaven.” His book begins with a kittenish “Special Preboarding Announcement” asking “that you check the following items at the gate before boarding: gloominess, stuffiness, cynicism, pessimism, intellectual snobbery, closed-mindedness, self-righteousness and prejudice against God or religion.” I beg to differ; that kind of baggage — otherwise known as healthy skepticism — is exactly what you need to fully appreciate what’s on offer in this consumer-age paean to the hereafter. I’d no more consider leaving my cynicism behind than DeStefano would contemplate surrendering his italics or — heaven forfend! — his exclamation points.

DeStefano, a Roman Catholic, worries that his fellow Christians fail to appreciate the fact that “God himself is outrageous.” They might even harbor suspicions that heaven is “boring.” DeStefano isn’t the first to voice this concern. Mark Twain wrote on more than one occasion that the popular conception of heaven lacked allure. He found the wings, the robes, the harps and the singing a decidedly unappealing package. In “Letters From Earth” (purportedly missives sent by an exiled Satan to the angels back home), he derides man for creating an imaginary heaven of little charm: “I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values. It consists — utterly and entirely — of diversions which he cares next to nothing about, here in the earth, yet is quite sure he will like them in heaven.” In Twain’s last published work, “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” new arrivals get issued the expected paraphernalia because that’s what they expect; most jettison the stuff after a couple of weeks.

Clearly, heaven needs a makeover, and here comes DeStefano to the rescue. Instead of picturing endless cloud banks and angelic choruses, we should understand that “God is the king of all travel agents and heaven is his five-star resort.” Furthermore, heaven is an actual, material place, not an altered state of being, and its human inhabitants will occupy physical bodies — the same ones they had while alive, only much, much better. And yet, the same.

Many lapsed Catholics will recognize in this an entrée into the Scholastic arguments with church doctrine that preceded their departure from the faith. The doctrine is a vast Rube Goldberg device in which primitive beliefs (the resurrected-body thing, for example) have become the occasion for elaborate theological work-arounds. For every sharp-witted question a kid ever posed to a nun, they’ve got answers. They’ve had 2,000 years to come up with this stuff.

So, according to DeStefano, who claims Scripture and the writings of such theologians as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas as his sources, you get your body back, only it’s young, healthy and slender. Even if you were born suffering from severe disabilities, you’ll be as robust as an “Olympic athlete.” This body will not be subject to the usual vulnerabilities, cravings, flaws and other limitations. It will be “indestructible,” “totally subservient to our wills” and able to transcend time and space. In other words, it’ll resemble our earthly bodies only it won’t be like them in any imaginable aspect, since it won’t have the same appearance, properties or capabilities. If you’re having trouble wrapping your brain around that one, picture being the “superheroes with their incredible superpowers” in comic books.

Despite having worked out this particular issue in great detail, and devoting an entire chapter on the question of whether our pets get to join us in our great reward, DeStefano suddenly goes vague on a matter of particular interest to Twain: Is there sex in heaven? Twain’s Satan marvels that man “has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights, the one ecstasy that stands first and foremost in the heart of every individual of his race — and of ours — sexual intercourse!” According to DeStefano, “No one is really sure of the answer to that question … God certainly wouldn’t want to trivialize the gift of sex by allowing it to be used by random partners, indiscriminately,” even though in heaven he will let us eat whatever we want without getting fat.

Apparently, although “God is a sensualist” who plans to make our afterlives “a feast for the senses,” there are limits to his “outrageousness.” Anything that has been “classified as sinful and ungodly” is dead out, and that means marijuana, you depraved potheads! On the subject of alcohol and caffeine, though, DeStefano remains curiously silent. Can you smoke? Are only illegal drugs banned from heaven? What if a drug is legal in some states, or maybe just decriminalized? Can we go over the part where unbaptized babies get sent to Limbo again?

Where all this really falls apart, though, is in the continuing-education division of DeStefano’s heaven: “How would you like to go fishing with Ernest Hemingway? Or play catch with Joe DiMaggio? How would you like to discuss literature with Jane Austen, or have Albert Einstein personally explain to you the workings of the universe?” A lot, maybe. But, more importantly, how would Jane Austen like to discuss literature with any and every nitwit who comes knocking on her door? If she’s like most very smart writers who don’t suffer fools gladly, my guess is not much. For Pete’s sake, even a $10 hooker gets to take a night off now and then. The heaven of a million ardent book-group members could easily become one writer’s hell.

But why should Jane Austen worry about that, when she can look forward to frolicking through “the vacation that never ends,” where she can witness “friendly lions and monkeys playing with brontosaurs and stegosaurs” and “walk through the streets of old Paris, or Renaissance Florence, or the China of the Ming Dynasty,” noshing on curly fries with nary a thought for her waistline? The more you read about DeStefano’s heaven — the angelic “tour guides,” the unending array of activities and attractions, the sanitary absence of anything difficult or unpleasant, and the perpetual company of one’s immediate family — the more familiar it all starts to sound. To savor these delights for all eternity, DeStefano recommends that we exercise all the admirable practices of true Christianity. But if you hanker after the quick fix — as Americans do, and who but an American would conceive of this sort of heaven? — there’s an easier way: It starts with a ticket to Orlando.

Both of these novels ask questions as difficult as those posed by any serious writer: Why do we suffer, why must we die, and what meaning can be found in any of it? More important, they are not afraid to respond to these questions unflinchingly. These books are often — very often — funny, but they aren’t frivolous. I can think of a dozen acclaimed contemporary adult novelists who blunder through this territory, wallowing in sinkholes of sentiment, tangling their narratives in thickets of saccharine fabulism. It makes no sense that the maudlin goo that is “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” should be classified as a work for adults, when “The Fault in Our Stars,” a far more mature rumination on the same themes, is regarded as a children’s book. Likewise, why should grown-ups be subjected to the cutesy “The Life of Pi” while teenagers get to revel in an astringent fable like “There Is No Dog”?

“The Fault in Our Stars” is told in the first person, with the sort of fresh, irreverent voice that inevitably gets compared to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. This story, however, comes from a character infinitely more appealing than Holden. Her name is Hazel Lancaster, and she is dying. The thyroid cancer that will eventually kill her is being held in abeyance by an experimental drug, but she still needs an oxygen tank, and she spends a lot of time worrying that she’s an emotional “grenade” for her parents. “There is only one thing shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re 16,” she observes, “and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer.” She’d prefer to limit the damage.

And yet, who could help but love her? Certainly not Augustus Waters, a survivor of osteosarcoma with a replacement leg he calls Old Prosty. The two meet at a support group, where they are suitably skeptical about the inspirational mottoes and the covert competition to end up among the 20 percent who’ll still be alive in five years. A tender, bookish, wisecracking romance ensues, fueled in part by the couple’s shared enthusiasm for a novel, “An Imperial Affliction,” Hazel’s favorite, yet something she mostly “can’t tell people about, one of those books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”

“An Imperial Affliction” ends in the middle of a sentence, and while Hazel thinks she knows why, she still wishes she could find out what happens to its characters. The author, who has written nothing else, lives reclusively in Amsterdam. The two young people hatch a plan to visit him and extract the answers to Hazel’s questions. It’s a quest complicated by the difficulty of traveling with oxygen tanks and prosthetics, but enabled by the sort of favors Hazel sardonically refers to as “cancer perks.” There will be grenades, but not in the places where you expect them.

The sparkling, satirical “There Is No Dog” extrapolates from a clever premise: If this world — “not just full of suffering” but “full of perversity, of things that go horribly wrong more or less at random. For the hell of it” — has a creator, the only deity messed up enough to have made it must be a teenage boy. His name is Bob, and he’s petulant, self-absorbed and hormone-addled. Most of the actual work gets done by the middle-aged Mr. B, a put-upon administrative second banana who spends his time frantically trying to limit the damage caused by Bob’s moods and negligence.

Bob got punted this job (“miles off the beaten track in a lonely and somewhat run-down part of the universe”) by his feckless mother, Mona, who won it in a celestial poker game. His initial efforts at creating light consisted of “fireworks, sparklers and neon tubes that circled the globe like weird tangled rainbows,” all of which Bob regarded as “very cool” even though they didn’t work. (The functional aspects of the solar system were executed by Mr. B while Bob napped.) Creating humanity in his own image (“one big fat recipe for disaster”) is this creator’s crowning misdeed and results in a long history of Bob falling in love with mortal women, an emotion whose agonizing ups and downs trigger bizarre weather and other natural disasters. “There is No Dog” begins just as a lovely assistant zookeeper named Lucy comes to Bob’s amorous and catastrophic attention.

Rosoff gets an impressive amount of mileage out of what might otherwise seem like a joke. This is largely due to a lively extended cast of characters who include Lucy’s mother, the dispirited vicar who pines for her, Mona’s terrifying poker buddy and his thoughtful daughter, Estelle. There’s also Bob’s neglected pet (“I don’t ignore him! Just last night I made him bring me some food!”) the Eck, an endearingly hapless “penguiny” creature, the last of his kind, in danger of being eaten by Estelle’s father.

It’s debatable whether Rosoff’s shrewd, trim prose might not occasionally fly just over the heads of teen readers. (Lucy’s mother is memorably described as “having the air of an expensive pony — sturdy, alert and well-groomed.”) But it’s rather thrilling to know that stylists of her caliber have dedicated themselves to writing for young readers, and that it doesn’t even seem to occur to her to pander to them. Not much in today’s culture inspires hope for the future — or at least not credibly so — but I count the knowledge that so many teenagers read and love books like “The Fault in Our Stars” and “There Is No Dog” as one of the bright spots.

“The Lifespan of a Fact” by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal documents the epic fact checking of “What Happens There,” an essay D’Agata wrote about a teenager who committed suicide by jumping from the observation deck of a Las Vegas hotel. Their exchanges merit publication in part because D’Agata is the leading light of a literary movement (largely confined to MFA programs in creative nonfiction) advancing the “lyric essay,” a form that combines elements of poetry with the prose essay. D’Agata has been militant in asserting his liberty as an artist to alter, invent or ignore facts in writing his essays, as well as critical of the eruptions of outrage that greet the increasingly commonplace discovery that some celebrated memoirist has embellished or fabricated parts of his or her work.

If this face-off between a meticulous establisher of truth and a bold champion of poetic license strikes you as a bit contrived, then I say: well spotted! A provocative excerpt from the book appeared in Harper’s last week, featuring each man performing his role to the hilt. Fingal pettifogs obsessively over whether there are 31 or 34 strip clubs in Las Vegas and D’Agata makes the absurdly highhanded pronouncement that “the rhythm of ‘thirty-four’ works better in that sentence than the rhythm of ‘thirty-one,’ so I changed it.” Several of D’Agata’s most dickish replies have been cherry-picked for inclusion.

This excerpt is not a fair representation of the book, but then the book itself is a travesty of the fact-checking process. The impression has been given that Fingal is a paid fact checker for Harper’s, the magazine that originally commissioned D’Agata’s essay. Actually, he was an intern for the Believer magazine, a literary journal that picked up the piece after Harper’s declined to publish it and that encourages its interns to volunteer for ambitious projects and pursue them independently. When Fingal tells D’Agata, early on, “It’s the job I was assigned to do, so I have to do it,” he is — ironically enough — not being strictly accurate.

Any lingering impression that Fingal is a put-upon toiler in the boiler room of journalism dissolves as he introduces more and more tedious digressions and unfunny wisecracks into an ever-burgeoning pissing match. Many of Fingal’s quibbles — such as asking D’Agata for notes on a guided bus tour he took as a college student in 1994, or insisting that the mountains southeast of Vegas look “brownish” to him, rather than “black” as D’Agata described them — are so over-the-top that the writer’s snappishness becomes understandable.

Fact checking, contrary to vague popular perceptions, is something of an art; not only does each publication have its own policy for substantiating facts, but each checker has his or her own approach. Nevertheless, there are many constants. Fingal’s method is eccentric, to say the least. For example, he tracks down and transcribes the National Institutes of Health’s definition of a drug that one of D’Agata’s quoted sources mentions only in passing, yet he never seems to have contacted any of the sources themselves, either to check their quotes or to verify their titles or biographical details. Much of what he does is unnecessary by even the most rigorous of magazine fact-checking standards (and glossy-magazine fact checking is as rigorous as it gets), and yet he neglects some basic techniques of verification.

D’Agata is no better advocate for his position. He offers the “rhythm” defense more than once, and when Fingal raises legitimate questions about his attempt to present suicide as a universal taboo across cultures and historical periods, he stoops to the retort, “Wow Jim, your penis must be so much bigger than mine.” (Although it must be said that this is a pretty fair characterization of the tenor of their arguments.) It’s not until late in the game that D’Agata engages Fingal in a substantive discussion of what he’s trying to do, best stated as “taking liberties” to make “a better work of art — and thus a better experience for the reader — than I could if I just stuck to the facts.”

The bonehead comments-thread response to this assertion is “There’s a name for that: fiction.” But there are enough confirmed facts in “What Happens There” — real names, people, places and events — that it doesn’t constitute fiction, either. Of course, the whole dispute could be fairly easily defused by labeling D’Agata’s work as a lyric essay and including an editor’s note (for the many readers as yet unfamiliar with the genre) explaining that it contains factual material but is not restricted to factual material. That describes most contemporary poetry, after all. A magazine like Harper’s might decide that it isn’t comfortable publishing prose works of this kind, but no reader could claim to have been misled.

Such a reasonable solution, however, would severely reduce the opportunities to grandstand about how today’s readers don’t “have enough deep experiences with art to know that that is what art is for: to break us open, to make us raw, to destabilize our understanding of ourselves and of our world so that we can experience both anew, with fresh eyes,” and so on. (Why is it that people defending purportedly innovative art always seem to fall back on the most shopworn cliches and the hokiest Romantic-hero narratives to do so?) D’Agata’s rhetoric in this section of “The Lifespan of a Fact” is so overblown in comparison to the substance of his quarrels with Fingal that the effect is comical. The freedom to remove a “clunky” comma from the name of a school or to “streamline” quotes from a newspaper interview seems unlikely to catapult a piece from a pedestrian bit of reporting to a “an enactment of the experience of trying to find meaning.”

Nevertheless, a case can be made for what D’Agata wants to do, and in his defense he maintains throughout “The Lifespan of a Fact” that he doesn’t claim to write “nonfiction” or “journalism,” and has never espoused or promised factual accuracy in his essays. However, he is (in “What Happens There”) writing about the death of a real person, a boy named Levi Presley, and Fingal suggests that the “gravity” of this subject urges greater fidelity to accuracy in each detail. D’Agata replies, “The important thing here is the search for meaning … I am seeking truth here, but not necessarily accuracy.”

Here is the crux of the matter and one in which fact checking plays an overlooked role. When I first read “What Happens Here,” long before I became aware of D’Agata’s provocateur status, I could barely finish it, and abandoned the rest of the book. The authorial voice was insufferable — preening and self-important. Many writers are indeed vain, but the good ones are able to keep this from infecting their work. Vanity has the effect of blinding an artist to the very truths D’Agata intends to pursue.

No genre scourges a writer’s delusions of grandeur and omnipotence more fiercely than nonfiction. The fact checker is its whip. Yes, as Fingal discovers in the final pages of “The Lifespan of a Fact,” even official records can contradict each other and sometimes the truth is impossible to determine. But most of the friction between D’Agata and Fingal in “The Lifespan of a Fact” doesn’t involved disputed facts, only aesthetically inconvenient ones. D’Agata would prefer that his interpretation and depiction of reality not be encumbered by having to accommodate such facts. He thinks his essays are better because he refuses to do so.

What effect does it have on a writer to be constantly confronted with facts that interfere with his or her stories about the world? It can certainly be maddening, as many a writer subjected to the ministrations of an overzealous fact checker can testify. It can mean 30-minute conversations about utterly meaningless quibbles. Fact checkers can also save your ass, a service that may not mean much to someone like D’Agata, who doesn’t care about being accurate, but which I have deeply appreciated every time I’ve benefited from it.

Mostly, however, fact checking — not just the experience of being fact-checked but often the mere expectation of it — makes you pay more attention to the world around you. It compels you to stop insisting on what you want things to be and to come to terms with what they are. It is, above all, a humbling experience, a perpetual process of correction that, far from instilling a false sense of certainty, makes you ever more alert to the myriad ways you can screw things up by falling in love with your own ideas or accepting a conventional truth at face value.

To me, this seems far more likely to break a person open and destabilize his understanding of himself and the world than hopping on D’Agata’s magic carpet ride of Art. The pity is that more nonwriters aren’t subjected to fact checking. It may not be fun, but it’s good for you.