Review of The Shack

The Shack, by William P. Young, Wayne Jacobson and Brad Cummings

“A bad book owes to many trees/a forest of apologies.” J. Patrick Lewis

A currently popular book is The Shack. It is a religious polemic pretending to be a novel. It has sold a lot of copies (though fewer than Harry Potter, with its theme of self-sacrifice). But C. S. Lewis once humbly noted that sales of his popular book, The Screwtape Letters, didn’t automatically guarantee that people were reading it. The Shack is being compared to Pilgrim’s Progress, a religious allegory from the 17th century. In the 28th century novel Hyperion, a sarcastic editor refers to the Pilgrim’s Progress effect—i.e., a book that people felt obligated to purchase, even though they never read it. Christopher Morley’s irrepressible bookseller Roger Mifflin (The Haunted Bookshop) remarked, “…there is no such thing, abstractly, as a ‘good’ book. A book is ‘good’ only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error. A book that is good for me would very likely be punk for you.” The possibility exists that The Shack will speak to some people, but that many more will follow Dorothy Parker’s recommendation for a bad book, “…not to be tossed aside lightly, but to be thrown with great force.”

But let’s pretend that it is a novel. The major characters are Mack, a middle-aged father, grieving the death of his six year old daughter at the hands of a psychopath; God the Parent (an African American woman named Papa—who later assumes the appearance of a man—who speaks like Gone With the Wind’s Mammy, albeit with standard grammar); Jesus (a Middle Eastern man who denounces organized religion); and the Holy Spirit (an Asian woman, alias Elouisa or Sarayu). Three years after the murder, they all spend a few days together at the murder site, so that Mack can come to terms with his loss.They have a lot of chatty, heart to heart conversations, while eating Papa’s home-cooked meals; walking on water with Jesus; confronting Sophia, the physical representation of Wisdom, in a cave; and having lots of other fun, summer-camp experiences. We are told, over and over, that Mack is suffering The Great Sadness (italics are the authors’). Their chummy conversations would not be out of place at a neighborhood barbecue. Even when Mack is supposed to be crying out his pain, his suffering appears to be slighter than actors on TV commercials complaining of indigestion. The reader knows that a terrible wrong has been done to a child, and that he should be appalled, but somehow this book is leeched of all authentic emotion.

One of the best criterions of fiction is Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief”. My disbelief never left the ground. I couldn’t swallow the reality of any of these characters; I couldn’t feel their pain. [There are two recent, superb novels about missing children that are much more intense. Try reading Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson, or In the Woods, by Tana French.]

Another test of a fiction’s worth is the Jillsy Sloper standard (from The World According to Garp): you read “to find out what happens”. I choked my way through the entire book (my book club will be discussing it soon), and found that surprise! Mack learns to trust God, and to accept that while God cannot stop evil, he can use it to promote good, and that Missy is happy in heaven with Jesus. What original ideas! The characters are contrivances, the plot is appalling, and the prose is dreadful. It’s nearly as nauseating as The Bridges of Madison Country.

None of this disparagement is meant to cast doubt on the existence of God. But there are so many fine novels in which breathing characters deal with God, faith, loss, pain, hope, forgiveness, acceptance, redemption—why read this tedious, maudlin mess?

One of the best novels that incorporates religious faith without preaching is Heidi, a book that can be read at age 10 or age 90. Heidi’s unswerving faith in an always-listening God, who can turn evil into good, is shown to be true by the actions of the characters. [Be sure to read the original, and not a dumbed-down adaptation.]

For real pain over the loss of a child, guilt & forgiveness, read In This House of Brede—I’ve read it many times, and still tear up. For self-inflicted guilt & redemption, try Saint Maybe, and watch 19 year old Ian take on the responsibility for his brother’s kids, after having maybe accidentally killed their parents. (Ian is helped by The Church of the Second Chance—there’s never been a better name for a church.) For a sense of religion shaping a community, try The River Midnight, set in a late 19th century Polish shtetl, and watch God work through the rabbi, the midwife, the butcher, the thief.

If The Shack is not a novel, it could be shelved in the nonfiction, religious section, next to (the more imaginative and readable classic), The Screwtape Letters. Or it could be found beside the thoughtful, painful When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Why isn’t it? Maybe it’s because the trinity of authors are very modest, or because they can hope for greater sales if their work is labeled fiction, or because they have no theological degrees at all. What can one make of the character Jesus’ hard judgment that organized religion is one of the three great evils in the world (along with government and economics), unless the authors are unattached to any mainstream church.

There is a fair amount of pseudo-theological gobbledygook, like this sentence: “If the female had been created first, there would have been no circle of relationship, and thus no possibility of a fully equal face-to-face relationship between the male and the female.” This is merely irritating.

But then here is this head-scratcher: the character Jesus says: “Those who love me come from every system that exists. They were Buddhists or Mormons, Baptists or Muslims, Democrats, Republicans and many who don’t vote or are not part of any Sunday morning or religious institutions. I have followers who were murders and many who were self-righteous. Some are bankers and bookies, Americans and Iraqis, Jews and Palestinians. I have no desire to make them Christian, but I do want to join them in their transformation into sons and daughters of my Papa, into my brothers and sisters, into my Beloved.” (chapter 12) But Papa says: “Like I said, everything is about him. Creation and history are all about Jesus. He is the very center of our purpose and in him we are now fully human, so our purpose and your destiny are forever linked. You might say that we have put all our eggs in the one human basket. There is no plan B.” (chapter 13) Does no one else find these two statements inconsistent? Do the authors believe that all religions are valid, or only one?

Some of the “comfort” offered isn’t comforting. Sarayu says, “A child is protected because she is loved, not because she has a right to be protected.” And Jesus assures Mack that he had been with Missy throughout her kidnapping, torture and murder. If this is a novel, with a fictional character called Jesus, do you find it comforting, or sadistic, that he held the hand of a child who was being sliced and diced? And if this is a novel, does it make sense that a god (under any name) who is capable of producing good from evil, waits until numerous little girls were murdered, so that He could first have his healing chat with Mack, and only then let Mack find Missy’s body, with the clues that the authorities need to arrest the psychopath? Does anyone find this idea of God consoling? (Is God planning a week-end for all the other children’s parents?) The book of Job is more honest: terrible things happen; God is inscrutable; deal with it by faith. Religions can demand your faith in the ultimate good; novels earn it. This pious non-novel, despite all of the laudatory praise heaped on the front pages, does not deserve its acclaim. It was written on a word processor, not on stone tablets.

Another best-selling book, a true novel, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, show the faith, courage, & self-sacrifice of its people as they try to fix their broken world as much as possible. One of the most direct characters says, “Reading good books spoils you for reading bad ones.” Maybe that’s why I gagged on The Shack.

Reviewed by Bonnie Egli, Swissvale Library