The Great American Read--The Book of Books

by PBS

THE SHACK

  William P. Young · 2007

  If God called, would you answer? If God sent you a summons, would you accept it? Mourning the murder of his daughter, Mack Phillips receives an enigmatic invitation to meet God in a place known only as “the shack.” He goes.

  There he learns that God the Father is actually a kindly African American woman who goes by “Papa.” This interpretation of God angered readers who subscribed to an image of God as an elderly, bearded white man with a fiery temper, but Phillips’s depiction resonated with others looking for a multicultural interpretation of divinity. To date, The Shack (2007) has sold 20 million copies. Academy Award–winner Octavia Spencer plays God in the 2017 film version of The Shack, which also stars Tim McGraw.

  Before the blockbuster Christian thriller begins, Mackenzie Allen Phillips (known as Mack) took three of his children on a camping trip in Oregon. While Mack rescued two from drowning, his youngest, Missy, was captured by a serial killer. Four years later, Mack receives a note, purportedly from Papa—the name Mack and his wife use for God—instructing Mack to go to the shack where Missy is thought to have been murdered. At first the shack resembles the horrible, falling-down structure where his daughter may have spent her last hours. But then it transforms into an incredible place inhabited by God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.

  As Mack discovers during his weekend at the shack, Papa is unstinting and generous, sympathetic and caring. She urges him to forgive his daughter’s killer, yet Mack must also learn to forgive Papa, who let the murder happen. He speaks at length to Sophia, the embodiment of Papa’s wisdom. Jesus is a Middle Eastern carpenter, and together he and Mack walk across water. The Holy Spirit manifests as Sarayu, an Asian woman. She catches Mack’s tears, then pours them over Missy’s grave. As flowers bloom, Mack begins to understand how suffering might finally have a broader, bigger purpose, one that could enhance and enrich a person’s life.

  Young wrote The Shack while commuting among his three jobs. He envisioned it as a Christmas present for his six kids, a way of sharing his outlook and belief system, as well as a means of giving them something for the holidays when he couldn’t afford anything else. The self-published novel garnered so much word-of-mouth praise that a publisher came calling in 2008. The shack, as Young has explained, is a metaphor for the place people construct inside themselves to put shame, suffering, and pain. Secrets inhabit the shack, as does addiction. Young has been candid about the ways his own experiences, including sexual abuse and adultery, shaped his novel.

  William Paul Young was born in Canada in 1955 but moved to New Guinea as an infant with his missionary parents. He graduated from Warner Pacific College, married his wife, Kim, and worked a variety of jobs in a range of industries, some of which involved corporate communications and other types of business writing. On the side he wrote short stories, songs, and poetry. He printed the first 15 copies of The Shack at a local Office Depot. Since the book’s incredible success, Young has published two more novels, Cross Roads (2012) and Eve (2015), along with a nonfiction book entitled Lies We Believe About God (2017).

  The Shack deals with how to cope with an almost-unimaginable horror—the loss of a child. But the novel functions less as a handbook for working through grief, and more as a guide to spirituality. It offers an alternative to prescriptive dogma and features the warm, loving embrace of a God who covers her children in grace.

  The Bantam Books paperback edition of Siddhartha, originally published in 1922.

  Author Hermann Hesse was celebrated for years in Germany before his novels garnered attention in the United States in the 1960s.

  Prince Siddhartha (563–400 BCE) became Gautama Buddha, and his teachings made the foundation of Buddhism.

  82

  SIDDHARTHA

  Hermann Hesse · 1922

  Hermann Hesse won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature. In making its selection, the committee recognized “his inspired writings which, while growing in boldness and penetration, exemplify the classical humanitarian ideals and high qualities of style.” Widely revered in Germany, his novels came to prominence in the United States in the 1960s; with its emphasis on an individual, idiosyncratic, and independent route to spiritual enlightenment, Siddhartha (1922) enabled generations to turn on, tune in, and find their own truth.

  As a child in a missionary family, Hesse seemed destined to follow a pious path. Born in 1877 in the Black Forest region of Germany, he was close to his grandfather, who had proselytized in India and helped translate the Bible into Malayalam, the official language of Kerala. Even as he stoked his grandson’s religious faith, this grandfather encouraged Hesse to develop a cosmopolitan outlook that would influence his writing. In his youth Hesse began to suffer from depression and attempted suicide on at least one occasion, after which he was institutionalized. He began working in a bookstore that specialized in theology, and started reading carefully and thoroughly.

  Siddhartha, Hesse’s ninth novel, describes the spiritual journey of a well-liked young Brahmin named Siddhartha in India around 625 BCE. He spends his days romping about with his best friend, Govinda. Yet he feels as if something is missing. Siddhartha and Govinda meet a group of Samanas, who renounce physical desire in their quest for enlightenment, and they decide to join these ascetics. Depriving himself of clothes and food helps for a while, but eventually Siddhartha’s emptiness returns. He and his friend set off to find Gautama the Buddha, who, they’re given to understand, recently reached Nirvana. While Govinda senses a kinship and decides to stay with the Buddha, Siddhartha decides to go the opposite route and devote himself to the pleasures of the flesh.

  The earthly realm bears fruit: Siddhartha falls in love with a courtesan named Kamala and becomes wealthy. He develops a fondness for gambling. In a now-familiar pattern, however, Siddhartha once again grows ill at ease. As he tries to commit suicide by drowning, he hears the river gurgling “om.” He decides to apprentice himself to a ferryman named Vasudeva. Although Vasudeva’s life seems simple—he spends his days listening to and watching the river—he seems utterly at home in himself. At last, Siddhartha discovers peace and the boundless unity at work in the world.

  Siddhartha’s journey to transcendence takes the form of a quest. Unlike Arthur’s knights, who seek the Holy Grail, or Odysseus, who longs to return home, Siddhartha searches for inner peace. While Govinda finds what he needs as a follower of the Buddha, Siddhartha discovers his Nirvana only when he forges his own way. It’s a radical notion, as Siddhartha basically rejects sanctioned intermediaries and established dogma. By the end, Govinda comes to Siddhartha as a pupil does to a teacher, seeking to understand his old friend’s doctrine.

  Following Siddhartha, Hesse wrote two autobiographical novels. Then, in 1927, he published Steppenwolf. Like Siddhartha, Steppenwolf features a protagonist in spiritual crisis. Drawing on Hesse’s life as well as psychoanalytic techniques, Steppenwolf is a dark study of a dark soul split between his immoral urges and his desire for respectability. These two novels remain widely read in the years since Hesse’s death in 1962, in effect showing two sides of the same existential coin. As thinking beings, we are both cursed and blessed—cursed because we constantly perceive the ways we fail; blessed because we are capable of continuing to strive for redemption.

  A paperback edition cover of The Sirens of Titan, from 1998.

  Kurt Vonnegut, photographed circa 1970, smokes a cigarette, probably his favorite Pall Malls.

  Vonnegut in his office, sitting at his typewriter. The author weaved philosophy with silly absurdism.

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  THE SIRENS OF TITAN

  Kurt Vonnegut · 1959

  While it’s tempting to look down on a sci-fi story about Martian invaders told in a flat style across short paragraphs, Kurt Vonnegut’s second novel, The Sirens of Titan (1959), is a sophisticated work of philosophical literature. As absurd and seemingly silly as it might be, it is also an intellectual extravaganza.

  In The Sirens of Titan, Vonne
gut posits a question he would wrestle with through many other novels and short stories: To what extent do we have free will, and to what extent are we at the mercy of fate? The wealthiest man in the United States, Malachi Constant, gains a fortune through what he believes to be divine favor, but which may actually be random luck. He encounters another rich man, Winston Niles Rumfoord, who may or may not hold Malachi’s destiny in his hands. Rumfoord is stuck in a time warp that enables him to see the past and predict the future. He intends to wage war with a Martian army against Earth in order to introduce his new religion, which posits that God is indifferent to humankind. Salo, a robot from a planet called Tralfamadore, convinces Constant that Rumfoord, along with everyone else, is being manipulated by forces they can’t see. In fact, human history’s sole purpose has been to help the Tralfamadorians get the part Salo needs to fix his spaceship.

  The plot gets even more complicated from there, but essentially it tracks the characters as they search for meaning in what could be a meaningless universe. As with an onion, readers can keep pulling back layers, possibly tearing up as they do. If nothing matters, how might one live? But for all its pessimism and nihilism, the novel ultimately offers love as a solution.

  Along with philosophy, the novel serves up a healthy portion of satire. Vonnegut constantly turned a sharp eye on the society in which he lived. In The Sirens of Titan, as well as other works, he lambasts the unequal distribution of wealth. Unpleasant people get rich, while deserving people stay poor.

  Biographers sometimes theorize that Vonnegut developed his sense of humor in response to decidedly unfunny events, as a laugh-so-you-don’t-cry coping mechanism. He was born into an affluent family in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1922, but the money evaporated during the Great Depression. In 1944, his mother committed suicide. A few months later, he was captured during the Battle of the Bulge, along with thousands of other American soldiers, and was a prisoner of war in Dresden. He survived the intense Allied firebombing of that city in 1945 by hiding in a meat locker inside a slaughterhouse, an experience he would revisit in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Around the time he was working on The Sirens of Titan, he and his wife, Jane, took in three nephews after his sister and her husband died, adding to their family of three biological children.

  Success took a while, but it found Vonnegut eventually. The novel was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1960, and the author received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967. Douglas Adams, another master of the absurdist school of science fiction, cited Vonnegut as an influence, as did Joseph Heller and John Irving. Vonnegut died in 2007 at age 84. The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia purchased movie rights to The Sirens of Titan in 1983, but nothing came of the option. A television series based on the book is currently in development.

  Though we may not be—or even know how to pronounce—Tralfamadorians, we can see in the adventures of Vonnegut’s characters our own cosmic struggles. The Sirens of Titan is complex and a little confusing, much like our existence is complex and a little confusing. The novel both mines our world for ideas and mimics our world in experience.

  A first edition of A Game of Thrones, originally published in 1996. It’s the first volume of the Song of Ice and Fire series.

  George R. R. Martin signs copies of A Dance with Dragons in Toronto, Canada, in 2012.

  The Gullfoss waterfall, in Iceland. The Game of Thrones TV series was filmed in many locations like this one across the country.

  The Iron Throne, from the HBO series, was on display during a concert at the Hollywood Palladium in August 2016.

  84

  A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE SERIES

  George R. R. Martin · 1996–present

  Winter is coming.” Along with launching a thousand memes, the motto of House Stark has been used to describe everything from meteorological events to presidential elections. It originated in the novel A Game of Thrones (1996), the first in an epic, and immensely popular, fantasy series that tracks the battle for the Iron Throne and dominion over the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros.

  As a series of five novels thus far, A Song of Ice and Fire ranks with The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) and The Wheel of Time (1990–2013). All three series offer vast, thoroughly realized imaginary universes full of charismatic characters, interesting settings, and supernatural elements. The novels—A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings (1999), A Storm of Swords (2000), A Feast for Crows (2005), A Dance with Dragons (2011), The Winds of Winter (forthcoming)—pose moral dilemmas, depict worlds in the throes of great change, and introduce a range of individuals to root for or despise. Unlike its predecessors, however, George R. R. Martin’s work features more sex and more politics. Indeed, Martin’s books have such complicated plots that he often consults with the person in charge of maintaining the internet’s largest forum devoted to A Song of Ice and Fire just to make sure he’s keeping everything straight.

  Martin cites conflicts like the Hundred Years’ War and Wars of the Roses in England as inspiration. His books detail the fates of several noble families. As they fight among themselves and with one another with notable vehemence and viciousness, a second battle rages: the 8,000-year-old Wall is all that stands between the Seven Kingdoms and an undead army bent on destruction. Meanwhile, across the Narrow Sea, a young woman named Daenerys Targaryen amasses people and harnesses her dragons to prepare a devastating attack on Westeros for the Iron Throne.

  Born in 1948 in New Jersey and christened George Raymond Martin, he adopted the middle name “Richard” when he was confirmed at age 13. Martin earned a bachelor’s and a master’s in journalism from Northwestern, then taught at the college level and ran chess tournaments while writing on the side. The death of a friend caused him to turn to writing full-time in the late 1970s. As he published short stories and novels in the 1980s, he also worked on television shows like Beauty and the Beast. In the early 1990s, he began penning the series that would become A Song of Ice and Fire.

  Many people refer to the novels by the title of the first volume, which is the name HBO chose when it debuted its adaptation in 2011: Game of Thrones. The lush TV re-creation of Martin’s fiction quickly became one of the most watched series in history. For various reasons, the show departs from the books, but Martin has been heavily involved in the HBO production from the beginning. A slow writer by his own admission, Martin has promised that he will finish the sixth novel even as HBO plans to end the television series after season eight, and as he consults on HBO’s forthcoming multiple prequel spin-offs.

  Fans mention point-of-view characters like Daenerys, Arya Stark, and Cersei Lannister when discussing the series’ treatment of gender roles. Strong female protagonists and secondary characters appear throughout the novels, and several significant plotlines demonstrate an arc from waiflike girl to formidable warrior-like woman. However, the series has also been accused of misogyny, as many of these same women undergo some form of sexual violence. Martin responds to such criticism by citing the past: “My novels are epic fantasy, but they are inspired by and grounded in history. Rape and sexual violence have been a part of every war ever fought.… To omit them from a narrative centered on war and power would have been fundamentally false and dishonest, and would have undermined one of the themes of the books: that the true horrors of human history derive not from orcs and Dark Lords, but from ourselves.”

  A copy of the original typed manuscript for Nineteen Eighty-Four, with Orwell’s notes. The novel coined terms like Big Brother and doublethink.

  J. R. R. Tolkien kept careful notes to keep track of his Elvish language, something he’d started creating as a child.

  In a Manner of Speaking

  NEOLOGISMS, PORTMANTEAUX, AND NEW LANGUAGES

  LANGUAGES EVOLVE, bending and changing with the times, and through the efforts of those who know them best. Writers can set new species loose in the linguistic environment by giving us idioms and sayings that capture ideas and feelings better than any of our previous options. And in some cases, writers create entirely new verbal
kingdoms as a way of rendering their fictional worlds a little more real and a little more readable.

  THE CHEESIEST SNARK

  Novelists have a long history of lending words to English and the culture at large. One of the most noteworthy such writers was George Orwell. In Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Orwell fashioned such neologisms as Thought Police, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, doublethink, and Big Brother—words that routinely pepper political discourse, particularly with regard to totalitarian and authoritarian policies.

  We worry about eating Frankenfood, a catchall term for genetically modified food, that combines Frankenstein and food—and reminds us that, in the 1818 novel by Mary Shelley, it’s the doctor who’s named Frankenstein, not the monster, as is commonly believed.

  When talking about snark, we might chortle—two portmanteaux (words created by combining two separate words) coined by Lewis Carroll: the first marrying “snake” and “shark,” and the second “chuckle” and “snort.” The word yahoo arrived in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), where it describes a race of ignoble humans enslaved by horses. J. D. Salinger popularized the phrase screw up; Stephen King gave us pie-hole, slang for “mouth”; and Charles Dickens invented cheesiness, rampage, butter-fingers, and flummox, among others. We have Dr. Seuss to thank for nerd, and John Green and his fans for nerdfighter (a positive appellation celebrating those who love all things geeky).