Cultural Vegetable of the Week: The Age of Innocence (1920)
Vegetable Equivalent: Iceberg lettuce
Nutritional Value: An example of how “progressive” thought hides its own reactionary impulses
Recommended Serving Size: Read slowly and steadily over a month; garnish with Martin Scorsese’s workmanlike adaptation if desired

Edith Wharton wrote The Age of Innocence in 1920, but she set the novel fifty years earlier. Wharton traffics in the style of Henry James more than Theodore Dreiser, but this novel’s prose is brisk and lean in a way that James’s rarely was, if ever. Wharton often turned her gaze toward the New York social elite from whence she sprang, and The Age of Innocence is about a definitive moment in that set’s evolution. The 1870 setting suits Wharton because her literary roots are as firmly planted in the soil of sentimentalism as they are realism. No one will mistake this book for McTeague. In the novel’s protagonist, Newland Archer, we get a synecdochal protagonist for the privileged upper class, a man who feels himself at once superior to, and barred from what he wants by, social mores. The novel’s tone is thoroughly ironic, as Archer continually misreads as progressive the very traits that consign him to the status quo.

The novel satirizes not just its characters but their entire social scene. Wharton’s characters spend countless hours in evening wear attending operas or social engagements hosted by New York’s most prominent families. At one of these early operas, Wharton takes the time to comment on the performance:

She sang, of course, “M’ama!” and not “he loves me,” since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

Just who set such “an unalterable and unquestioned law” in place remains a mystery. A labyrinthine and arbitrary code is all that remains.

Archer is intelligent enough to recognize the staged quality of each of these affairs. He has just become engaged to the most beautiful girl in his set, Mae Welland, who for Archer represents the innocent woman in the novel’s titular age. Archer’s problem is that he is both attracted to and repelled by Mae’s innocence.

[W]hen he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.

This passage establishes the novel’s chief tensions. In terms of plot, Archer finds himself more drawn to Mae’s world-wearied cousin, the already married Countess Olenska, than his own fiancée. In terms of form, the passage juxtaposes terse insights with longer, more complex sentences. In terms of the novel’s themes, Archer realizes how arbitrary and highly constructed the seemingly “natural” rules of his society are.

Archer makes a characteristic mistake in attributing Mae’s constructed purity to the women in her life. Archer would like to imagine that men like him would handle the question of feminine propriety differently. Though Mae’s father is alive, it is her aunt, Mrs. Manson Mingott, who holds the purse strings and real power in the Welland family. But Archer is far too modest. It is the behavior of he and his cohorts that maintains the social structure necessary for such “factitious purity.” Archer’s peers are philandering husbands, the crooked banker Julius Beaufort and the social commentator Lawrence Lefferts. While despising the way these men duplicitously deal with their wives, Archer closely resembles them in his desire for two lives, a superficial one that will satisfy high society and a clandestine one where he can find a woman with thoughts of her own. The passage’s central irony is that Archer knows and resents what he is supposed to want yet cannot see his desire for the tainted Olenska as similarly affected by societal forces. Mae is not the simpleton Archer imagines, and an open relationship with Olenska would not bring Archer the happiness he thinks it would.

The novel closes at the dawn of the 20th century with a solitary Archer walking back towards his hotel room. In the intervening time, he has become a dinosaur. The social mores that still consume his thoughts have long been forgotten by a new generation, particularly his own children. He once thought himself progressive; he is now unescapedly passé. He too was guilty of a factitious purity, one that manifested itself as an ironically innocent view of transgression.

Cultural Vegetable of the Week: Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
Vegetable Equivalent: An onion, mostly because it is multi-layered, but also because it might make you cry (but only from laughter)
Nutritional Value: Witnessing the birth, development, and decay of an obsession
Recommended Serving Size: As much as you can in as little time as you can, so as to mimic the breathless search at the novel’s heart

I have an obsessive relationship with knowledge. Once something is stuck in my craw, I pick at it with every sharp, pointy object I can get my hands on. Ten bloody hours later, I’ve extricated the offending mote, but at what cost? The search is often captivating, but it’s never clean.

This novel accurately captures that thrill and deflation. In fact, it encourages obsession. It’s short, so you can read it quickly. In content, it’s a kind of mystery novel, so you are tempted to figure out the puzzle that leaves the novel’s central character flummoxed.

The novel’s central character is Oedipa Maas, Californian housewife, and if the name doesn’t strike you as unnecessarily strange, then perhaps a list of the novel’s other dramatis personae and their corresponding occupations will: Wendell “Mucho” Maas (radio disc jockey), Dr. Hilarius (German psychotherapist), Mike Fallopian (advocate for the Peter Pinguid Society, an extremist group that finds the Birch Society too leftist), Ghengis Cohen (a prominent LA philatelist), and Randolph Dribbette (theater actor and director with a penchant for obscure Jacobean revenge tragedies). These and more are crammed into 180 pages, with plenty of room to spare for jokes about pop culture staples like Perry Mason and the classic radio program The Shadow as well as vocations like “used car salesman” and “psychiatrist.”

Because this novel is about the search for knowledge — whether it be of the self or the world — the names and details listed above are temptations for the reader to mimic the novel’s plot. The novel is about nothing if not about “plot,” with an equal emphasis on that word’s two meanings: 1) a story’s action and 2) conspiracy.

A brief attempt, then. Pierce Inverarity (yes, that’s his name) is dead. There is no doubt whatsoever about that. Oedipa Maas, Pierce’s former lover and current wife of KCUF radio DJ “Mucho” Maas, finds herself appointed co-executrix of Pierce’s will. While attempting said execution, Oedipa stumbles upon a mysterious organization known as Tristero and its chief manifestation: an underground postal system. Suddenly, she detects the system’s icon — a muted post horn — everywhere she looks. She follows the system’s trail from a performance of a Jacobean revenge play to a gay bar in San Francisco, from the bed of dying man who wants Oedipa to send a letter that bears the underground mail system’s stamp to the back porch of the English professor who edited the Jacobean play that started Oedipa’s journey. The novel begins with Oedipa learning of Pierce’s death and ends with the auction of Pierce’s estate. The novel’s title refers to the lot number assigned to Pierce Inverarity’s stamp collection. A philatelist’s dream, the collection contains several examples of Tristerean postage.

Oedipa has uncovered an alternative America. Beneath the veneer of mass culture (the novel’s ubiquitous television shows, rock songs, and movie clips), there lies a seemingly disparate but interconnected world of business, art, and scholarship. Like her classical namesake Oedipus, Oedipa searches for the truth. When someone finally says what she’s been afraid to admit — that the entire Tristero thing might be Pierce’s practical joke or a skein of unrelated oddities — Oedipa collapses under the weight of all the evidence she’s accumulated. We do too. The novel evokes the illuminating, exasperating, and (yes, even) boring moments of an honest to goodness search, one that is both intellectual and religious. Fittingly, we see her on the threshold of belief and in the throes of crippling doubt.

Oedipa never overtly interprets what’s happened to her. She tells her story but tries to leave its meaning implicit or simply absent. I won’t. The novel demonstrates how tempting the search for knowledge can be and how such a quest is inextricably bound up with our own mortality.

This is not a Top 10 list of 2011. I feel daunted by the sheer number of worthwhile books that came out last year (both those I’ve heard of and those I haven’t). Time, money, and availability are the enemies of every reader who seeks to do his due diligence to the medium. Instead of a list of the best books of the year, I offer up 10 Good Books — something I can much more easily recommend in good conscience. These each are books worth the time and attention of discerning readers. These books may be highly entertaining or entirely discussion-worthy or deeply thoughtful or intriguingly complex or wonderfully simple. They may be any of these things or a collage of these perfections, but at the end of the day: these are Good Books.

by Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon
published by DC/Vertigo
256 pages
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Far and away my favourite release of 2011, Daytripper actually competes with Duncan the Wonder Dog (my favourite book from 2010) for the honour of being my favourite graphic novel of all time. Gorgeously illustrated in a manner that unveils the world through deep attention to detail, colour, and tone, the book explores not just the particular life of its protagonist but the nature of life generally. Daytripper is the story of Brás, a writer of obituaries who, at the end of each chapter, narrates his own demise — because at the end of each chapter, Brás dies. It’s an interesting method of exploring life, its purpose, and its possibilities. By evaluating Brás’ life in each moment it could end, Daytripper‘s creators prompt readers to investigate the value in their own lives. Powerful, worthwhile stuff.

by Craig Thompson
published by Pantheon
672 pages
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Craig Thompson’s epic-length follow-up to his roundly lauded semi-memoir Blankets is in many ways a more difficult work than what was previously considered his magnum opus. Habibi has been plagued by charges of sexualization, objectification, and Orientalism by those who, I would argue, don’t quite understand the work. Still, this large book provides an all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet for thought and will give the more courageous book clubs piles to talk about. While exploring themes of Islamic tradition vs. Judeo-Christian tradition and playing with Miyazaki-level ecological concerns, the main purpose of the book seems to be an exploration of love vs. sex and the interaction of the two when sex is rendered impossible. As such, Habibi deals frankly and visually with the human body and sexual interaction and can only be recommended to mature believers whose consciences won’t be damaged in the reading.

Christians especially will find Thompson’s exploration of religious themes compelling as he continues to grow away from his fundamentalist roots and deeper into a confirmed atheism with an interest in spiritual traditions.

by Anders Nilsen
published by Drawn & Quarterly
658 pages
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Maybe some books are there less for what they say and more for what they ask. Anders Nilsen, the man who wrote the worst graphic novel I’ve ever read (Monologues for the Coming Plague) also wrote one of the best. Big Questions, a 658-page doorstop of a book, tells the story of some finches, some crows, an idiot, a narcoleptic pilot, some donut crumbs, a snake, some squirrels, and a bomb. And it poses questions about life and purpose and meaning and faith.

Nilsen’s book, in production for over a decade, is fascinatingly spare. Panels often float around the page with neither border nor background. The characters, primarily birds, often have nothing at all to say — or when they do, speak in staccato punctuations of ideas and questions. There’s a lot going on in the book and it can be difficult to trace the author’s thread in any unbroken sense throughout, but in the end the experience is worth the time invested. At a $45 cover, the price is a bit steep, but Amazon discounts or the judicious use of a library card can knock the wind out of that particular bugbear.

by Nate Powell
published by Top Shelf
304 pages
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Nate Powell’s exploration of the war-culture of the ’80s (reflecting today’s own of the same) skirts the bounds of surrealism and charts the lives of three children as they grow up and into a broken world whose demands are more violent than the fragile human spirit can bear. Powell is one of the brightest of the newer crop of comics creators who use the form to narrate complex ideas. His prior work, Swallow Me Whole, was a wonder of abstraction, focusing on mental disabilities and Any Empire continues his trend of creating compelling stories through superior visual technique.

by GB Tran
published by Villard
192 pages
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Vietnamerica explores author GB Tran’s family history through the primary obstacle of Tran’s own history of disinterest. The reader charts along with Tran the incredible journey that his family had taken through the tumult of America’s relations with Vietnam during the ’60s and beyond. Tran allows readers to eavesdrop while he himself as an adult learns about his family’s life in Vietnam before he was born and leading up to Saigon’s fall. He sprinkles in anecdotes from his parents’ attempts to integrate into the American landscape. Tran’s artwork is beautiful and his easy linework and painted colour help turn Vietnamerica into something much more than Maus in Vietnam.

by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, and Guy Davis
published by Dark Horse
1462+ pages
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When Mike Mignola spun off from Hellboy a series featuring the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, I wasn’t excited. The first two volumes of the series ran about as well as I had expected. Neither were bad but neither were particularly good. Then, out of the blue it seemed, with the release of volume 3, BPRD turned some kind of corner, becoming the most exciting adventure/horror series on the market. That was in 2004 and the train just keeps barreling along. The first arc of the BPRD’s story, now known as Plague of Frogs, wrapped up cataclysmically in December 2010 and paved the way for the next year’s developments. The new arc, Hell on Earth, explores a world out of Lovecraftian-style terror, where the walls between our world and another begin to collapse and creatures alien to our experience begin the creep, crawl, and burst through. Watching as the BPRD’s agents work hard to control damage in a war that the world is (at for the moment) clearly losing is exciting and I await each new volume with an excitement I feel for few books.

by jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick
published by First Second
272 pages
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Richard Feynman may be the funniest physicist to ever live. He is, at least, the funniest I’ve ever encountered. Jim Ottaviani’s biographical comic goes a long way toward capturing the whimsy with which Feynman approached the universe. The chief goal of Feynman, perhaps, is to bring readers to understand the physicist’s own chief goal: that we should recognize the inexplicable and wondrous in our universe and acknowledge when such a thing is beyond us.

One of the abiding motifs that Feynman’s character hopes to impress upon the reader is the infinite complexity of physical things. Scientists have names and formulae to describe any number of processes that govern our world, but do they truly understand these things or are they just ridiculously dedicated to the art of taxonomy? Feynman, in a number of ways, cynically suggests the latter. After all, there’s only so much headway the finite can make when rushing toward the infinite.

by Kate Beaton
published by Drawn & Quarterly
168 pages
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I almost stopped believing that joie de vivre in comic strips could exist in the post-Calvin & Hobbes world. Generally speaking, newspaper strips just aren’t funny. Kate Beaton, however, proves that they absolutely can be — that comic strips can be smart and witty and urbane and culturally acute (even if the culture she appropriates is generally more than a century passé — fans of CAPC column “Eat Your Vegetables” should get more out of the book than the average reader). Hark A Vagrant! is a rare work in that it shows what the newspaper comics page ideally could have become if it hadn’t been overrun with uninspired and unfunny legacy comics for years and years and years.

by Vera Brosgol
published by First Second
224 pages
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Generally speaking, YA lit just doesn’t ring true at all. The tropes of high school melodrama are well established and we recognize them from cultural artifacts like books and movies but not from reality itself. Still, there are always a few works of the genre that don’t play to cliché and, thankfully, Anya’s Ghost avoids most of the usual traps of the form. There are even moments when I found myself gleefully surprised at a direction in which Vera Brosgol would choose to take her story. Anya’s Ghost is about three things: a girl named Anya, high school shenanigans, and, of course, a ghost. The joy of the book is in the details of how the story all works out rather than in the genius of any of the three parts on their own.

Brosgol works hard to make Anya a character who very easily could be weird or strange or unwelcome but isn’t. She’s an immigrant teen and by her word we learn that she’s worked very hard to compensate for her inauspicious country of origin. She’s overcome her accent, acclimated to the cultural diversity of young American life, and doesn’t dress like someone who’s just discovered clothes. She’s embarrassed by her native culture and goes to lengths to distance herself from that which will mark her as Foreign. Sometimes that means shortening an obnoxiously difficult-to-pronounce last name and sometimes it means forsaking the other kid from your country who hasn’t quite overcome his eager-foreigner tendencies yet. It’s an interesting take on the concept of being The Other and Brosgol does a good job of always keeping the story accessible.

One of the greatest boons to American experience of the medium in the last ten years is the explosive import of Japanese comics (colloquially known as manga). Currently, there are numerous series of thoughtful, intelligent work being published (many of these through Viz’s Signature line). Each of these is worth readers’ time and attention. I’ll give a brief overview of several titles that I’m personally invested in and look forward to regularly.

20th Century Boys
by Naoki Urusawa
published by VIZ
Naoki Urasawa (creator of Monster and Pluto) is putting forth a strange, exciting thriller in which a group of childhood friends reunite in their adulthood to stop a dangerous, possibly world-ending cult that they may have accidentally created from their imaginations back in elementary school. Like a lot of manga, it does a good job sublimating the idea of a status quo and shakes things up enough that the reader never gets too comfortable.

Children of the Sea
by Daisuke Igarashi
published by Viz
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While the series seems to be on indefinite hiatus (no news of a vol. 5 yet), the four available volumes to the story present a completely unique comics experience. Children of the Sea tells the story of two young teens: Ruka and Umi. Ruka is the not-atypical daughter of a broken family. She lives with her mother but hides out at her father’s aquarium. Umi is a boy who, along with his brother Sora, was found as a toddler being raised by dugongs (a.k.a. manatees, a.k.a. sea cows). Both Umi and Sora are more at home in the water than on land and their bodies have specially adapted to deep-sea free diving and swimming incredibly long distances with an ease unheard of by normal humans. Ruka shares with them a special kind of vision, a way of seeing the ocean and its inhabitants. There is a sense of reverence and oneness between these three and the creatures of the deep. Fascinating series.

Cross Game
by Mitsuru Adachi
published by Viz
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Explores the power of romantic and familial love to fuel childhood promises across intervening years. Ko is a high school baseball star and is driven by a dream that Wakaba had for him in their childhood, that he and rival Akaishi would play together in the Koshien (Japan’s high-school–level World Series equivalent). Touching, exciting, humourous, and compulsively readable. Note: don’t let the baseball theme dissuade you from giving this a try; neither my wife nor I care anything for baseball, yet both of us adore the series. (Series releases one oversize volume every three months and should wrap in Summer 2012.)

Ooku: The Inner Chamber
by Fumi Yoshinaga
published by Viz
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A reimagination of Japanese history that takes a kind of note from Brian K. Vaughan’s Y the Last Man. Taking place during the 17th century, Ooku posits a female Tokugawa shogunate in the wake of the red-face pox, a plague that mysteriously wipes out three quarters of the nation’s men. The book (through more feminist eyes) retells engagingly the alt-history of Japan in a smart, thrilling, and surprisingly romantic manner. (Series releases one volume per year and should wrap in 2015 at a total of ten volumes.)

Saturn Apartments
by Hisae Iwaoka
published by Viz
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Window washers in space! Saturn Apartments is a fake sci-fi book. It takes place on a ring satellite in low orbit above the earth and there are space suits and all, but the book is really just an opportunity for superflat artist Hisae Iwaoka to explore the lives and dreams of the characters she’s created. It’s an exciting book to take part in as its release gradually unfolds. Generally, I prefer to take in a series once its publication is complete (thereby eliminating the story-hindering two-to-ten-month wait between volumes), but Saturn Apartments is such a quiet pleasure for me that I’m happy to take it in whatever chunks are available.

Twin Spica
by Kou Yaginuma
published by Vertical
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A sweet, heart-twisting tale of a girl, a ghost, and a dream to reach the stars. Ayumi is a small (under 5 ft) teenage girl who’s enrolled in astronaut school and hopes to be among the first astronauts in Japan’s space program since a horrific rocket disaster over a decade earlier. The books explore the pasts and presents of Ayumi and her friends as they seek to overcome the various challenges their unique life-circumstances have dictated. Best not read in public if misting up embarrasses you. (Twin Spica is released bi-monthly and will be 16 volumes long, completing its series in October 2012.)

Wandering Son
by Shimura Takako
published by Fantagraphics
Nitori is a fifth grader who wishes he was a girl and gradually finds himself dressing like one. Takatsuki is a fifth grader who wishes she were a boy and is happy to dress as one. The book explores issues of gender identiation and transexuality across the landscape of the onset of puperty. It’s a fascinating work that hypothesizes the difficulties that journeying through such circumstnces might accrue.

Yotsuba&!
by Kiyohiko Azuma
published by Yen Press/ADV
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Perhaps the most charming book in the entire world, Yotsuba&! cannot really be described apart from the experience of the book itself. A lovely little series.

Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding
Chad Harbach’s debut novel, The Art of Fielding, records the rise of college shortstop Henry Skrimshander, along with his near-derailment by performance anxiety. Henry’s struggle stands in as a metaphor for both “What am I supposed to do after college?” panic and, well, the Human Condition. For an example, take the following passage in which Henry reflects on the promise of the structured, purpose-filled world of athletic training:  “Henry knew better than to want freedom. The only life worth living was the unfree life, the life Schwartzy had taught him, the life in which you were chained to your one true wish, the wish to be simple and perfect. Then the days were sky-blue spaces you moved through with ease. You made sacrifices and the sacrifices made sense.” Henry doesn’t have to bear the burden of metaphorical meaning-making alone: the supporting cast of characters, including the Westish College president, all wrestle with vocation and calling. Melville, chronicler of obsessive quests for perfection and meaning, as well the despair of those lacking such a quest, haunts the pages of The Art of Fielding, but knowledge of Moby-Dick isn’t any more essential than knowledge of baseball (I certainly have very little of the latter) for appreciating the novel. Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot has received a little more attention as THE college/post-college novel of 2011, and I enjoyed the portions of it relating to semiotics, but for my money, The Art of Fielding has more interesting characters and themes.

Lev Grossman, The Magician King
Lev Grossman’s The Magician King, sequel to 2009’s The Magicians, may be somewhat uneven—not to mention troubling—but it still ranks as one of my top five novels of the year, in part because it’s one about which I’ve had the most fruitful and interesting conversations with fellow readers. Grossman’s Harry-Potter-meets-Narnia world could easily be dismissed as derivative, as dressed-up fan-fiction, but I’m more inclined to read the novels as realistic college/post-college novels that just happen to be partially set in other people’s fictional universes. Like The Art of Fielding and The Marriage Plot, The Magician King plumbs the depths of post-college angst, exploring the failure of both formal schooling and the school of hard knocks to prepare one for life in the real (Real?) world. The difference is that, in this case, the real world involves satyrs and talking sloths.  (If you’re interested in a book on the failure of higher education in a world in which sloths remain speechless, check out Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.)

Colson Whitehead, Zone One
I’ve been a fan of Colson Whitehead’s fiction (especially his 1999 novel The Intuitionist) for a few years, and I was particularly interested to see his newest novel, Zone One, billed as a new exemplar of the marriage between literary and genre fiction (the genre, in this case, being the zombie novel). As Glen Duncan’s controversial NYT review indicated, the novel is unlikely to find a following among those looking for a limb-chomping lark through postapocalyptic terrain. There’s limb-chomping aplenty, but the novel is primarily a portrait of the consciousness of protagonist Mark Spitz (almost everyone goes by nicknames in the New World Non-Order). Through Mark Spitz’s eyes, we see how post-zombie life really isn’t all that different from pre-zombie late modernity. Barricades to keep the right people in and the wrong people out? Check. Zone One itself isn’t so dissimilar from the New York City it once was. Setting the novel several years after the initial zombie outbreak allows Whitehead to skewer inane political rhetoric of optimism: the provisional government, centered in Buffalo, has an official theme song entitled “Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar? (Theme from Reconstruction).” Because Zone One occurs primarily in Mark Spitz’s mind, with flashbacks to both recent and more distant events, the novel is admittedly sometimes difficult to follow. But if you find that The Walking Dead features too little reflection on the hermeneutics of the everyday, then Zone One is likely to be your cup of tea. (Though I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature?, which argues that African American literature, as defined by the Jim Crow era, has come to an end, would be my companion pick for Zone One: both Whitehead and Mark Spitz are black, and though race receives very little explicit mention in the novel, race and the hotly debated discourse of post-blackness loom large as a subtext.)

Meg Wolitzer, The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman
In the category of children’s and YA fiction, my pick this year is Meg Wolitzer’s The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman, a light read targeted at the 8-12 age range. The novel plunges us into the world of competitive youth Scrabble, and the result is something like a cross between Ellen Raskin (The Westing Game) and the documentary Spellbound. Like Spellbound, The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman focuses on several protagonists to give us an idea of the range of reasons why kids would be drawn to a competition involving lettered tiles on a board. The titular Duncan Dorfman had never played Scrabble until a cafeteria incident revealed his special power of reading with his fingers, but now he sees the chance to be known at school for something other than having lunch meat stuck to his back. Nate Saviano is the more stereotypical kid who competes only because of parental pressure. April Blunt, my personal favorite, simply loves Scrabble, but she also wants to do well at the national tournament to prove to her sports-loving family that Scrabble is an endeavor as worthy as soccer. We meet several other teams along the way, including the Evangelical Scrabblers, who are portrayed as well-adjusted competitors with quirks no less charming than anyone else’s. The novel introduces a rather unnecessary antagonist, but most of the seemingly extraneous details turn out to play a pivotal role in the book’s plot, and that attention to structure is appealing. (Runner-up in this category: Rachel Neumeier’s The Floating Islands, which breathes some new life into coming-of-age fantasy clichés.)

Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture
Princeton historian Daniel T. Rodgers’s Age of Fracture has already received laudatory reviews from many publications, including Books & Culture, but I’ve selected it as my best nonfiction book of the year for Christ and Pop Culture because the book surveys American intellectual and cultural history of the 1970s through the 1990s (with a brief epilogue addressing the post-9/11 era). Rodgers selects “The Age of Fracture” as his moniker for late-twentieth-century America because of the disintegration of communal identities and the rise of a “self” (quote marks mandatory to indicate its constructed nature) characterized by “choice, provisionality, and impermanence; a sense of the diffuse and penetrating yet unstable powers of culture; an impatience with the backward pull of history.” Age of Fracture draws startling connections between political punditry (both right and left) and the rise of theory in academia as it devotes chapters to presidential rhetoric, economics, class, race, gender, and concepts of the public good. Such a totalizing portrait of an era surely goes against the key tenets of the Age of Fracture, but it makes for head-nodding, highlighter-wielding reading. I have to admit that my head nodded more in restlessness than in affirmation during the economics chapter, but, since Rodgers’s thesis is that free-market economic language both reflected and contributed to “visions of society as a spontaneous, naturally acting array of choices and affinities,” it’s worth slogging through. (And if “slogging” describes your approach to any book these days, you might pick up Alan Jacobs’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, an engaging—and brief!—ramble through reading-and-technology-related topics.)

Cultural Vegetable of the Week: Beowulf (the poem)

Vegetable Equivalent: Spinach, the vegetable of warriors

Nutritional Value: A Christian perspective on what’s worth keeping and discarding from the non-Christian past

Recommended Serving Size: The Seamus Heaney translation read loud in 200-line chunks

The Beowulf poet lived in Christian culture, but the legacy of England’s pagan past was all around him: the remains of Roman buildings, the offspring and cultural legacy of three Germanic tribes, and even the language he spoke and wrote in. Consequently, Beowulf is filled with bittersweet reminiscences. Although it was written in England, its action is set in Scandinavia. Although its poet was Christian, its protagonists are pagan. And although its titular hero is powerful, the poem ends with Beowulf dying as a result of the very pride that made him formidable.

The poem’s tone is more elegiac than nostalgic. Think, for instance, of the verse from Genesis 6 — “There were giants in the earth in those days” — with the mixture of awe and ethical complications such a statement implies. The world of Genesis 6 offers a good analogue for the poem’s action as we learn that two of the poem’s monsters are the demon-offspring of Cain. The warriors of this world believe in God but not in an afterlife. Immortality can only be achieved through earthly fame. God may grant a warrior his strength, but a warrior earns salvation through his own bloody works.

As an epic poem, Beowulf contracts into its title character the culture’s representative strengths and weaknesses; namely, Beowulf is powerful but proud. The poem does not biographically record Beowulf’s adventures from the cradle to the grave, but instead focuses on his three greatest adventures. The first two happen in Beowulf’s youth. A demon named Grendel has invaded the mead-hall of the renowned king and held sway for a dozen years. Beowulf visits and rids the kingdom of Cain’s spawn. But Grendel’s mother seeks revenge, and Beowulf must travel to her underwater lair to dispose of her. The poem’s conclusion records the aged Beowoulf, having served as king for fifty years, fighting a dragon to the death.

The poet critiques the violence of his Germanic ancestors, revealing revenge as a brutal cycle because its logic can be adopted by anyone. Beowulf uses it to avenge the men Grendel has killed, but Grendel’s mother can just as legitimately use it against Beowulf and his men after her son’s death. This culture was physically imposing but ethically corrupt. Its moral code ensured its demise.

The poem reminds us of a culture’s fragility, not only through its contents but by its very existence. It is the longest epic poem in the Old English language, yet only a single thousand-year-old copy of the manuscript survives. An eighteenth-century fire damaged this sole manuscript, and careless handling by readers further deteriorated its condition. There is no way of knowing if the poem was part of a larger tradition of oral epics or if Beowulf was regarded in its time as it is today, a quintessential statement of Anglo-Saxon values.

The poem provides an interesting juxtaposition with a later English epic, Paradise Lost. Milton’s epic heroes — Adam and Eve — must demonstrate a very different kind of heroism than Beowulf. Epic action, Milton maintains, does not require protagonists to fight dragons or conquer an opposing nation. Rather, real epic heroism is saying no to a tempting serpent. Beowulf’s heroism is external. His failings are internal. From the poet’s perspective, this is why Bewoulf’s story is so bittersweet.

Vegetable Equivalent: Broccoli, a vegetable forced upon you as a child but returned to with enthusiasm as an adult

Nutritional Value: Improved eyesight; greater awareness of proportion

Recommended Serving Size: Parts One and Four and a refusal to accept the 2010 Jack Black-vehicle adaptation as a substitute

Great satire makes unfamiliar the things we take for granted. Properly deployed, satire forces us to be both the observer and the observed, to see what’s wrong not only with the world but with ourselves.

Gulliver, the hapless protagonist and narrator of Jonathan Swift’s hilarious 18th Century satire, encounters four alien islands during his titular travels. The contrast between where Gulliver starts and ends up is so great that he doesn’t have to try to defamiliarize the world. That’s done for him. In Part 1, he encounters a race of six-inch tall humans: the Lilliputians. In Part 2, he finds himself on the island of the Brobdingnagians, giants twelve times his own size. By Part 4, he finds himself on an island where the civilized animals are horses (the Houyhnhnms) and the brutish animals are men (the Yahoos). In each location, he learns about how these people eat, educate their children, punish crime, and attain happiness.

Gulliver offers a first-person account of his travels, but we rely on him more for his descriptions than his commentary. Swift constantly underscores his interest in perspective by showing us things about Gulliver that Gulliver is completely oblivious to. Two examples from the Lilliputian voyage will suffice. Gulliver discovers that the Lilliputians have fought a religious civil war over whether an egg should be cracked at the big or little end. Gulliver doesn’t seem to make the connection between these diminutive creatures and their equally petty quibbles, but the audience immediately sees the critique: humans shed blood over stupid things. Elsewhere, the Lilliputians describe Gulliver’s belongings to their king, paying special attention to a “wonderful kind of engine” which “is either some unknown animal or the god that [Gulliver] worships.” They are talking about Gulliver’s watch, an item which Gulliver constantly consults. Thus, the Lilliputians expose a mundane, thoroughly routinized human behavior as a religious observance, something Gulliver never could or would notice about himself.

The satirical target travels back and forth between the strange creatures Gulliver encounters and Gulliver himself. As a result, we as readers can’t get comfortable. We don’t know when we’re supposed to judge or when our laughter will suddenly be held against us. The targets are occasionally easy, but Swift makes sure that there are just as many that expose Gulliver’s — and our — errant aim. We look down to realize that we’re the ones with bulls-eyes on our chest.

By the time Gulliver lands on the island of the Houyhnhnms, he has thoroughly internalized a cynical view of humanity, swapping rose-colored glasses for misanthropic contacts. The irony is that Gulliver runs not from the corruption of England but from himself and his own emptiness. He is a cipher, a hollow container to be filled with the views of whatever culture he visits. When on his final voyage, he encounters a creature most like himself — the Yahoos of Part 4 — he is so disgusted at their behavior and appearance that he wants them eradicated.

Swift’s final satirical jab is at satire itself, a radical skepticism that maintains nothing and critiques everything. Here, it’s not just the reader who is on trial; it’s the author. In this final voyage, Swift shows us his hands smeared black with the ink of his own poison pen.

Actual Vegetable Equivalent: The best garden salad you’ve ever tasted…served in a bowl the size of the universe

Nutritional Value: an anti-oxidant that will either answer your questions about God’s ways toward men or so overwhelm you that you drop the questions and simply proceed on faith that God knows what He’s doing

Recommended Serving Size: Books I–IV

Christ and pop culture lovers should know that John Milton is more than that scenery-chewing Al Pacino character in The Devil’s Advocate and Paradise Lost is more than a current movie project possibly starring the demonically coiffed Bradley Cooper. Paradise Lost is the greatest epic in the English language, John Milton’s seventeenth-century poem about the fall of man, and if you haven’t read it, you should. As one eulogist put it, to peruse Paradise Lost is to encounter “the story of all things.”

Are you drawn to sheer artistic chutzpah? Before the poem is thirty lines old, Milton says his “adventurous song” will pursue “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” (16). Are you dedicated to Christian art? Milton’s epic intends to do nothing less than “justify the ways of God to men” (26).

Long considered the pinnacle of poetic genres, an epic is a grand story told in a grand style about a grand hero who, in his/her actions, represents an entire race or people. Milton intends to, and often does, exceed his fellow epic poets: Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Spenser. Milton’s story is not just one grand story among others. It is the story of humanity: the fall. Its style is suitably grand, and its chief character represents not just one race or nation but all people.

For cultural analysts, Milton’s poem presents both an object of and model for study. The poem reads like an index to the best writing of western civilization, and he leaves no epic precursor unrevised. For example, look at the way Milton reframes the heavenly council in PL’s Book III, systematically rewriting Book IV of The Iliad, Book I of The Odyssey, and Book X of The Aeneid.

More than that, Milton provides readers with a template for cultural criticism. As he catalogues Satan’s minions in Book I, Milton briefly summarizes the stories the ancients told about Mulciber, a particularly beautiful fallen angel. He concludes with this commentary:

thus they relate,

Erring; for [Mulciber] with this rebellious rout

Fell long before; nor aught avail’d him now

To have built in Heav’n high Towrs; nor did he scape

By all his Engins, but was headlong sent

With his industrious crew to build in hell. (746–751)

This is a clear and concise model for Christian cultural criticism. We might call it Milton on Olympos, a counterpart to Paul on Areopagus. The great myths of Western literature are distortions of true spiritual history.

Some concluding tips:

Read the poem aloud. Because of his blindness, Milton orally dictated much of the poem to his daughters, and the poem’s blank verse is spellbinding.

Skim the poem’s first four books. You’ll visit Milton’s hell, heaven, and earth, in that order. Milton’s Satan, the chief character of Books I and II, has fascinated readers for over 300 years. When Milton travels to heaven, he doesn’t shy away from representing God, and the conversation between the Father and Son is revelatory. When Milton finally makes it to earth in Book IV, he gives Eve a detailed origin narrative, providing the mother of all mankind with her own voice.

I fell in love with Trixie at “Aggle flaggle klabble!” The lovable little girl from the Knuffle Bunny series embodies all the things that children’s writer Mo Willems does best: intimate, expressive, poignant characterization. Set against the photographed backgrounds, the simple elegance of Willems’ drawings amplifies real, raw emotions.

In the first book, Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale, we go along with Trixie and her daddy to the Laundromat—and watch the drama unfold as Knuffle Bunny is lost and ultimately found. The second book, Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity, shows an older and more articulate Trixie heading off to pre-school, where she makes a new friend and discovers that her Knuffle Bunny is “not-so-one-of-a-kind.” As the series progresses, Trixie grows up and her adventures with Knuffle Bunny engage with more and more of the world around her. The story’s scope increases in proportion to Trixie’s explorations, yet in the first two books, Willems never loses sight of his strengths. Trixie’s facial expressions, her loving and funny interactions with her family, and Willems’ pithy dialogue make the Knuffle Bunny stories feel like home.

All of that changes in the third and final installment of the series, Knuffle Bunny Free: An Unexpected Diversion. In this disappointing conclusion, the family heads to Holland, and unsurprisingly, Knuffle Bunny gets lost along the way and recovered at the end. It’s not the predictability that makes this story wilt, though. Instead of an intimate portrait, it’s a sweeping narrative with little dialogue, boring character interactions, and the basic creative writing issue of too much telling. Add to that a dull dream sequence that fails as an effective turning point for the tale and includes a lot of awkward fold-out pages that only detract from the reading experience.

I imagine many readers find satisfaction in the ending, where we see Trixie all grown up and can feel a sort of vicarious pride at her development. I also believe that the third book is quite meaningful for Trixie and her real-life daddy, but I can’t help thinking that Willems, in all his comedic talent, sold this one short. The beauty of the first two Knuffle Bunny books lies in the powerful emotions of the everyday, small exchanges imbued with meaning; Knuffle Bunny Free trades those things in for a grand scale that just conveys a less effective message and a less interesting story. I still love Trixie and Knuffle Bunny, but I feel like Knuffle Bunny Free is a diversion that lost its way.

This question seems to be weighing particularly on our cultural consciousness right now with regard to Narnia. Last December, when I saw the movie version of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (which I didn’t have the heart to review for Christ and Pop Culture—it was that bad), the only moment that felt sincere in the whole film was Lucy’s heartbreak when Aslan sends her away from Narnia—for good—at the end. His assurance that she’ll find him by his other name in her own world? Cold comfort. Her grief is what’s real.

Similarly, anger and despair at being expelled or excluded from some idyllic world (or at least a world that’s perceived to be idyllic) are what haunt me about the characters in Grossman’s novels.

The Magician King picks up where The Magicians left off, with perpetually dissatisfied Quentin and his friends ruling as the four Kings and Queens of Fillory. Quentin, on the surface, is inhabiting the perfect world, but we’ve seen him in perfect worlds before, and we aren’t surprised that he retains his restlessness and his hope that Meaning and Significance lie just beyond the horizon. So he goes on a quest—a quest bearing no small resemblance to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (in fact, this aspect of The Magician King parallels the movie version in that the quest involves seven MacGuffins—the difference being that both Grossman and Quentin will deliberately refer to their MacGuffiny status during the novel . . . making them meta-MacGuffins?). Accompanying Quentin on board the good ship Muntjac is Julia, now one of the Queens of Fillory, but formerly Quentin’s high school classmate. As we learn in a series of flashbacks interspersed with Quentin’s present-day quest, Julia took the entrance exam to Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy but was denied admission. The standard Brakebills memory-wipe failed to work on Julia, and she becomes obsessed with the world of magic, the world she caught a glimpse of, the world that she feels should have been hers. What plunges Julia into depression is that she knows that this world is real: “it wasn’t a dream or a psychotic hallucination—but they weren’t going to let her have it. There was a place out there that was so perfect and magical that it had made even Quentin happy. . . But Julia wasn’t. She was out in the cold. Hogwarts was fully subscribed, and her eligibility had lapsed. Hagrid’s motorcycle would never rumble outside her front door. No creamy-enveloped letters would ever come flooding down her chimney.”

So Julia learns magic on her own, the hard way, trading sex for spell recipes, racking up as many levels as she can on the “hedge magic” circuit. It’s never enough, though, because she knows that she’s still cut off from the true world of magic. She mourns her expulsion from an Eden she saw for only a few hours.

In Grossman’s world, if you’re kicked out of Eden, you can either try to fight your way back to it, or you can seek out some sort of consolation in human community. Julia experiences something of the latter with an online support group called Free Trader Beowulf, whose members she eventually meets and lives with at Murs, on the coast of France. Everyone in Free Trader Beowulf is seeking the same access to magic that Julia is, but for many of them this is no mere Promethean power-grab. Even if you’ve never had much sympathy for Faust, you do feel pity for the Free Trader who reveals that he wants to call down a god to earth, not to boost his magical capabilities, but because he has to take such a high dose of Nardil (the last-ditch effort medication when other antidepressants haven’t  worked) that it isn’t sustainable in the long term, and he wants the god to take him “home.”  All the Free Traders have similar, if less extreme, brain chemistry: depression figures here as a kind of exile from Eden, but it’s also what binds the exiles together.

Julia only belatedly realizes that, with the Free Traders, she has finally found a satisfying substitute for Brakebills. “She came to Murs looking for magic, but she was also looking for a new home, and a new family, and she’d found them all, all three, and it was enough. She was content: she didn’t need anything else, least of all more power. Her quest had ended and she hadn’t even known it till this moment. She didn’t want to become a goddess. All she wanted was to become human, and here at Murs it had finally happened.”

And then the community at Murs is completely and totally destroyed.

If we long for the Eden we’ve lost, we seek solace in human community, but that community is so precarious: once it becomes Eden to us, Grossman suggests, some higher power takes it away. (And I feel I should mention that that’s not all that’s taken away from Julia. Rape is one of those plot points that many sensitive readers want to know about beforehand, spoilers or no, and rape by a god might belong in a special category all its own.)

You may notice that I haven’t mentioned Quentin much so far. Many reviewers have noted that Julia’s plotline in The Magician King is more compelling than Quentin’s, and I suspect that this is at least somewhat intentional on Grossman’s part: as Quentin muses at one point, “Everyone wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.”

Quentin does get to be a hero, though, in a sense, as does Julia. Heroism is nothing like what they expected. Facing yet another Eden-expulsion at the end of his quest, Quentin realizes that “this was hard in a way he hadn’t counted on. You couldn’t kill it with a sword or fix it with a spell. You couldn’t fight it. You just had to endure it, and you didn’t look good or noble or heroic doing it.”

Quentin initially thinks that a hero’s quest is to find something, as heroes have done in countless tales. Readers of The Lord of the Rings (and Quentin would be one of them) are familiar with a hero’s quest to lose something. Heroism, in The Magician King, is neither finding nor losing, but rather enduring all that the gods take away from you.

All of this makes it rather ironic when Quentin, thinking bitterly of Ember the ram god’s apparent lack of power, asks himself, “What kind of god wasn’t at the top of the food chain in His own world?” Quentin doesn’t want a god who can suffer, because it strikes him as weakness (and, in Ember’s case, this seems to be true). The world of The Magician King is devoid of a God who would who would choose to exile himself from heaven and suffer as a human. Grossman’s cosmology makes room for apotheosis, but not incarnation.

Despite all their hyper-referential snark, Grossman’s novels strike me as genuinely longing for a lost Eden. They reflect a zeitgeist in which we know we can’t build the perfect society. We know that heaven can’t be earned, only granted—but, entitlement-prone generation that we are, we feel that it ought to be granted to all of us, as our rightful inheritance. To those with this mindset, what the gods choose to give and take away seems purely random. As Grossman wrote recently in an essay about his inspiration for The Magician King, “sometimes when you open a wardrobe you get to go to Narnia. And sometimes you just get busted for snooping and sent back to London to watch the bombs fall.”

My takeaway lessons from this experience were: (1) it’s apparently really hard not to be derivative in relation to The Hunger Games (which, in part, may be because The Hunger Games series bears a lot of similarity to other works like Battle Royale—or so I’ve heard); (2) if you’re writing young adult fiction and deliberately avoiding reading recent works for fear of contagious influence, it’s still important to have friends—or editors!—who have read them.

These two points came to mind repeatedly as I read Veronica Roth’s young adult novel Divergent, just released in May 2011. Divergent is set in a future dystopian Chicago, which is divided into five factions, each dedicated to celebrating and cultivating a single character trait: Abnegation (ascetics), Amity (Hufflepuff), Candor (tell-it-like-it-is folks), Dauntless (punks and goths), and Erudite (Ravenclaw). (Is it all too plain that I would be Erudite if I point out that some of those words are nouns and some are adjectives, and it would be much nicer if they were parallel?) On a set day, all the sixteen-year-olds in all the factions must come together and put on the Sorting Hat—I’m sorry, I mean “take a test involving computerized simulations”—to determine the faction to which they will belong for the rest of their lives (transferring from your birth faction to another faction at age sixteen is somewhat frowned upon, but fairly common). Beatrice Prior, like Harry Potter, receives an inconclusive result on the test—this makes her . . . wait for it . . . divergent!—and thus has to choose her faction. Though from Abnegation, she selects Dauntless.

From this point on, Divergent abandons all similarity to Harry Potter and begins to look more like The Hunger Games. Beatrice (now renamed “Tris”), along with other Dauntless initiates, must prove that she belongs: only the top ten initiates will be received as members. They must show their mettle through beating each other in brutal physical combat and through overcoming their fears with the aid of more computerized simulations. Like The Hunger Games’s Katniss, Tris is smaller than her competition and must find strategies to compensate.  Luckily—and quite unethically, I might add—she has some help from one of the Dauntless members responsible for training initiates, the mysterious eighteen-year-old named Four, who quickly becomes a romantic interest. Unsurprisingly, Tris also begins to discover that there are bigger threats and larger issues than her acceptance into the faction.

Divergent is the first book of a planned series. Like The Hunger Games series, it is narrated in first-person present tense, a device that began to show its wear even in Suzanne Collins’s writing. The prose in Divergent is fully functional, with none of the awkward flights of overworked metaphor that often characterize first novels (and Roth is only 22, so this is indeed an accomplishment). Roth shows promise: her style is always in service of the plot. In fact, if she has a cardinal flaw, it’s that the preconceived plot seems to drive everything, regardless of the internal plausibility of a character’s behavior.

This becomes particularly noticeable in the last third of the novel, when the action starts to pick up its pace.  Towards the end of the novel, our young lovers undergo a challenge more than slightly reminiscent of Peeta’s character arc in Mockingjay (and I’ll leave that fairly vague, in order to avoid spoiling either series). In The Hunger Games series, what happens to Peeta is devastating, since (a) Peeta is a saint; and (b) we’ve have two previous books in which to know and love his character.  Four, however, is less endearing, and his relationship to Tris is somewhat disturbing; the same plot points feel hollow, rushed, and obligatory without the emotional investment earned by Collins’s characters. Moreover, in Divergent, character deaths tend to feel both wholly expected and wholly unnecessary. They’re just marks ticked off according to the needs of the plot (which one could say is also true of The Hunger Games, but that is sort of a necessary function of the twenty-four-people-fight-to-the-death plot construction).

A perhaps less predictable aspect of Divergent occurs on the Acknowledgments page at the end of the book, where the first sentence reads, “Thank you, God, for your Son and for blessing me beyond comprehension.” Yes, Veronica Roth is one of us: on her blog, she describes herself as “a graduate of Northwestern University, a Chicago-suburb resident, a Christian, and A Tall Person, among other things.” If Divergent is imitative, at least it’s not imitative in the “I’m going to write a Christianized version of The Hunger Games” sort of way. The novel is published by an imprint of HarperCollins (full disclosure: my husband is employed by a different division of HarperCollins), not by a “Christian” publisher. Only a couple of explicit references to religion occur within Divergent: in one, Tris’s family gives thanks to God at the table, though she mentions that “not every Abnegation family is religious.” In another, Tris sees that Four has painted the words “Fear God Alone” on the walls of his room. Beyond that, there are few overt hints that Divergent’s author is a Christian. I get the feeling, however, that it might become more apparent in later books, since at the end of Divergent, Tris and Four go into hiding accompanied, for no apparent reason, by Four’s abusive father and Tris’s archenemy, a boy who participated in a mild sexual assault against her. It’s looking like a forgiveness setup is to come, and one that, as a reader, I’m not entirely comfortable with. I ardently hope that, in future books, Roth doesn’t turn the to-be-forgiven archenemy into part of a love triangle.

If anything, Roth’s Christian author status probably shows up most in her devotion to the gritty. There’s something of “proving I’m one of the cool kids, too” in the way that young Christian writers published by mainstream presses go about writing violence, in particular (for this trend, my husband blames the adulation of Flannery O’Connor by Christian writers who lack her skill or humor). In comparison to The Hunger Games, in which the actual depiction of violence is very restrained, Divergent is quite visceral.

Many of us here at Christ and Pop Culture have spent time criticizing Christian products that simply aim to baptize a popular secular trend. It’s heartening to see that Divergent doesn’t follow this pattern. Yet it is, if not evangelical-subculture-derivative, still derivative—and, for this, I’m more likely to hold the editor(s) to blame, since I consider it entirely possible that, like my friend, Veronica Roth had no intention of borrowing plot elements from Harry Potter or The Hunger Games series.

There’s also a bigger question here, the question of how desirable—or even achievable—the elusive quality of originality is for any writer, Christian or not. That’s a question that requires a more in-depth answer than I can give here, but here’s the short version: I don’t believe that Christians should embrace a Romantic model of artistic creativity, seeing the writer as a grand figure solely responsible for bringing his or her work into being. As the poet Richard Wilbur writes in “Lying,” “In the strict sense, of course / We invent nothing, merely bearing witness / To what each morning brings again to light.” I sometimes fear that, in reaction to the copycat works that have dominated evangelical subculture, newly liberated Christian artists will rush to the opposite extreme, making individual creativity into an idol. It’s simply not possible to create a wholly original work of art; nor does creativity happen in a vacuum. To the extent that a writer does possess a unique stamp, it is in part due to the community of influences that surround her.  These include the writers she has read, those who have shaped her style, whether she is aware of it or not. It also includes the people who read her manuscript, who have the responsibility to let her know if her work is too similar to others. Of course, both Hollywood and the publishing industry are all too eager to find the perfect formula that will create a failsafe bestseller, and so this responsibility falls by the wayside in favor of other interests. And this is a shame, because it impedes the development of young writers like Veronica Roth. But at least that problem is not unique to Christian culture.

Carissa Smith recently conducted an email interview with Susannah Clements (Associate Professor of English, Regent University), author of The Vampire Defanged: How the Embodiment of Evil Became a Romantic Hero (Brazos Press, which kindly sent us a review copy). The book traces the vampire’s evolution in pop culture, from its Christian roots in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, through its postmodern iteration in Buffy, and finally to the sparkly undead of Twilight.

Carissa: What, beyond the current omnipresence of vampires in pop culture, led you to write The Vampire Defanged?

Susannah: The book was primarily prompted by reflections and questions about how the portrait of the vampire has changed in the last hundred years. I had recently reread Stoker’s Dracula and was thinking about how different that vampire was from most of the vampires we see in popular culture now. Since I’ve long been a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I thought there might be a way to do a Christian analysis of a culturally relevant phenomenon and also write about a number of texts I really love.

I think of Brazos as a press that straddles the divide between academic and non-academic audiences well. What sort of audience did you envision as you were writing and marketing the book?

I had originally envisioned it as more of an academic project, but my editor at Brazos wisely encouraged me to make it more accessible for non-academics, who might also find the book of interest. I’d only written the first chapter when that shift was made, so I rewrote the first chapter and then wrote the rest of it as a “crossover” book. It’s being marketed to both an academic and non-academic audience. The chapters are still pretty heavy on literary analysis, so it’s not necessarily a quick or easy read for non-academics. But I think it’s definitely accessible to anyone who is interested in vampire stories and enjoys thinking through the issues deeply.

In the introduction to the book, you say, “More than anyone else, Christians should know how to read and view well. And we should read the culture around us as deeply and thoughtfully as we read canonical literature.” Obviously, for Christ and Pop Culture (and for me personally, as a literature professor at a Christian institution), that statement rings true. What, in your opinion, best equips Christians to read culture well?

I think there are skills in analysis and interpretation that we can learn through education and/or practice that will help us read culture well, but I think the main thing we need to do is take the culture around us seriously. It’s easy for us to believe that, since a book is just for fun and isn’t real “literature,” we can just read it mindlessly without it affecting us in any significant way. Or we want to think that most movies and television are just for entertainment, so the messages they are expressing aren’t really important. But the stories we tell ourselves have power over us, whether we recognize it or not. So I think the first step is to “read” culture with our minds on so we can start to understand what these texts are really saying.

In your analysis of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), you argue that the titular vampire represents sin–not only the seven deadly ones, but also the infectiousness of sin and the impossibility of conquering it without God’s grace. In the next major vampire novel, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), the vampire is no longer “a representation of sin and sin’s consequences–rather, the vampire provides a picture of guilt.” I found this point particularly insightful because, even for Christians, it’s easy to confuse sin–a condition–and shame–a feeling. Do you have any theories about what cultural changes might have led to this shift in the vampire’s symbolic significance?

I think the change in the vampire reflects a general shift in cultural worldview that has moved away from belief in the genuine condition of sin. Our culture often thinks in psychological terms of “deviance” or “disorder” rather than acknowledging sin as a spiritual reality. But even if we remove the reality of sin from our understanding of the world, the consequences of sin still exist for us. One of those consequences is guilt.  Vampire stories like Anne Rice’s present a really compelling portrait of the bewildering nature of guilt—and its endlessness—in a worldview that doesn’t affirm sin as giving meaning to guilt or that doesn’t offer Christ as an answer to it.

In your chapter on Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), you say that “the show actually goes deeper into the theological themes of grace, forgiveness, sacrifice, and free will than Stoker tackled,” but, at the same time, the show is secularized, “because of the way it refuses to affirm any definite spiritual reality but instead points toward many of them.” How do you define “the secular”? If a work is addressing theological themes at a deep level, how important is it for the Christian reader/viewer to label it as “religious” or “secular”?

I don’t think it’s necessarily important for us to label stories as “religious” or “secular.” Certainly, that can lead to artificial distinctions or compartmentalized thinking. But I do think it’s important to recognize that stories that explore religious or theological themes might be using them to draw conclusions that are neither religious nor theological. Christians are sometimes tempted to “baptize” texts that seem to deal with our pet themes—temptation, sacrifice, salvation, etc.—even when, at times, these themes are used to express entirely irreligious messages. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t value or find meaning in stories that don’t have Christian or even spiritual purpose. I think Buffy explores rich, complex theological issues better and more thoughtfully than most “Christian” fiction I’ve read. But I would be seriously misreading the show and significantly skewing the artistic expression of its creators if I claimed that—because sin and sacrifice are prominent themes—the show’s ultimate conclusions are theological or religious. The Christian themes in certain storylines and episodes are in service of the show’s larger message, which is about being human and living in the world. They aren’t exploring a relationship with God (any god) or a spiritual reality. Recognizing this doesn’t make Buffy any less meaningful to Christians, but I think we do need to recognize and acknowledge it if we are going to be good readers of the show.

That question also brings us to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga (2005-2008), of which you say, “As the vampire has become an idealized romantic superhero, he has lost his potential for spiritual and theological reflection.” However, the main themes you draw out in the Twilight Saga–the power of free will and the idealized nature of romantic and familial love–seem to me to be fairly consistent with a Mormon worldview (albeit at a shallow level). To what extent do you think vampires can be successfully co-opted by other religious traditions?

Well, vampires can mean what we want them to mean—which is one of the reasons they’ve been so popular for so long. So certainly other religious traditions can “co-opt” them and shape them into something else. Once the vampire loses his traditional characteristics, which were grounded in the Christian tradition, however, he becomes less and less recognizable and I would say less and less powerful as a metaphor. In many cases, I think storytellers would do better to call the super-human creature something other than “vampire” and thus be freer to tell the story they want to tell. I’ve read a couple of good studies of the Twilight Saga, highlighting how the novels reflect a Mormon worldview. I definitely think there’s something there, particularly in the last half of the last book in the series. But, for most of the Twilight Saga, I think the vampire, embodied in Edward, is primarily shaped by conventions of romantic fiction rather than theological or spiritual issues, either Christian or Mormon.

In the conclusion, you say that Christians are somewhat to blame for the secularization of the vampire, partly due to the knee-jerk “vampires are demonic” response and partly due to apathy. On the hopeful side, you argue that “If Christians can understand the vampire better, we can discuss, create, and inspire a respiritualized figure of the vampire. In doing so, we can help return the vampire tradition to the power it once had. We can give vampires their fangs again.” Why is it so important to rehabilitate the vampire tradition? If Dracula already did it so well, why do we need new, re-sanctified vampire books and movies?

We tell ourselves the same stories over and over again—sometimes because the stories are true and sometimes because we believe them to be true. Jane Austen wrote fantastic love stories, but that doesn’t mean we have no need to tell good love stories today. In the same way, we could be using the vampire artistically to tell ourselves stories we need to hear—true stories about sin, sacrifice, salvation and grace. Right now, because of the ubiquity of vampire romances, one of the main things vampire stories are telling us is that love and sex are most “hot” when they’re dangerous and forbidden and that a women’s existence is given value by the love of a powerful man. These stories simply aren’t true, but they’re being told through the figure of the vampire over and over again. There are so many “true” stories the vampire could allow us to tell, it would be a shame for Christians not to take advantage of it.

I was waiting for The Count from Sesame Street to make an appearance in your book, but he never did. Any comments on his cultural significance?

Well, I guess The Count is probably another example of the domestication of the vampire in our culture—we can laugh at the vampire now, not just be scared of him—although honestly I can’t speak intelligently on that character, as I haven’t watched Sesame Street in twenty-five years!

What new projects do you have in the pipeline?

I’m working on a Christian companion to British literature that could be used for a supplemental text in British lit survey courses at Christian colleges. I also have a werewolf book in the back of my mind, although I haven’t actually done anything with it yet.

Let’s get some of the details out of the way. The book is hilarious, I mean laugh-out-loud uncontrollably hilarious. Fey’s comedic wit permeates nearly every line of every page. Whether she’s writing about her first period, her father, her lack of boyfriends, her job at the YMCA, or photo shoots, you can’t help but laugh. The book is also pretty crass and at times vulgar. She references genitalia frequently for some strange reason. But the truth is that Fey doesn’t really care if you like it or not (she wrote an entire chapter just on that point, aptly titled “I don’t care if you like it”). The book is also obviously geared toward women and frequently offers inspirational messages to the working woman, the mom, and the girl struggling to make it in showbiz. Not being at any of those stages of life… oh and not being woman too, means there’s much of the book that just doesn’t resonate with me, and yet I was still engaged by every chapter. Fey’s style is captivating (as my 3 a.m. moment revealed). In all actuality I learned a great deal about Fey, an actress, writer, and producer whose work I love. What I most enjoyed learning, however, is that even while Fey and I will disagree on many things (she is after all a feminist liberal and I am a conservative pastor) this is exactly the kind of person I would love to have lunch with.

It seems that Fey doesn’t take anything so seriously that it isn’t worth poking fun at, including herself. It’s not that she is disrespectful (well, except when responding to “fan” mail. See “Dear Internet” page 163). The truth is that she realizes every political party, every religious group, every celebrity, everyone everywhere in fact has had a Sarah Palin, Charlie Sheen, or Tina Fey moment. To be honest, it was incredibly refreshing to read and reflect on these facts. In a world and context where everyone takes themselves, their politics and their views so seriously that they can’t take a joke, Tina Fey serves as a breath of fresh air.

She is smart, there’s no denying that, but she doesn’t come off as pretentious. She comes off, instead as an average person. She has moments of pettiness that she regrets, like when she manipulated a director not to cast the girl who “stole” her boyfriend. She has moments of craziness, like when she left work at SNL without telling anyone because she was afraid of anthrax. She both loves and hates the way she looks. She seems rather shocked at her climb to celebrity status, her getting the job at SNL, and 30 Rock’s success. But nonetheless there she is standing in the spotlight.

The truth is, of course, that Tina Fey is a brilliant writer with a gift for good comedy that excels at subtlety. Both 30 Rock and Bossypants demonstrate her skill with the hilarious tertiary comment and the subtle mocking. But she doesn’t take herself so seriously that she has to put on some semi-elitist façade. She doesn’t think she’s above everyone else, that she shouldn’t have to face crappy days, nor does she pretend to have life all together (read the chapter about her honeymoon). The book reminds me, in typical Fey fashion, not to take myself so seriously. It reminds me to ease up, enjoy the craziness every now and again. It reminds me to laugh at others because they can do stupid things, and they need to take themselves less seriously. It also reminds me to laugh at myself, because I am not as smart, funny, creative, or generally important as I often convince myself I am. The book reminds me to laugh at Tina Fey, because she is hilarious!

Christ and Pop Culture writer, Ben Bartlett and guest-writer, Kiel Hauck, two friends who spend their Friday nights playing video and board games in between heated theological, social, and political discussions, come together to hammer out their thoughts about a book that seems to have most other evangelicals shutting down lines of communication, intentionally or not.

Each week, they’ll read one chapter, and trade a few emails discussing the chapter. This week, they discuss Chapter 3: Hell.

Ben Bartlett: “Why does Rob Bell get to be the independent arbiter of truth?”

Kiel,
I am excited about Rob Bell’s chapter on Hell. More than any other time, he seems to be making clear arguments about his perspective. That’s helpful, because it gives me the opportunity to do what every Christian should do with theological teaching: test it in every way they know how to determine whether it conforms to God’s revealed will in Scripture. The opportunity to test a teaching is key in Christianity, because we trust that God’s revealed will is true, and as such is the standard for right vs. wrong. Testability is necessary in the pursuit of faithfulness.

Now, Rob makes four fascinating arguments.

1. When Jesus talked about hell, the words he used show us that he was mostly talking about physical suffering within this life.

2. Jesus was strongly interested in people’s hearts in the here and now.

3. When Jesus talked about hell, he alluded to the idea that there is still hope for those already destroyed.

4. Themes of God’s redemption and the versatility of certain Greek words show us that it is perfectly reasonable to believe God always redeems, while he doesn’t really discuss the idea of punishment that is eternal.

Would you say that’s pretty fair?

Let me run through these briefly and I think you’ll see why Rob’s arguments present a problem, at least to me personally.

1. In my last post I linked to what I think is a helpful criticism; Rob seems to have massaged meanings a bit. He uses obscure meanings of words or “original” meanings without considering context (think about the way we use the word “cool,” which has pretty much nothing to do with the original meaning). My larger issue here is this: Rob doesn’t seem open to being corrected on this by Biblical scholars. If it could be proven that his analysis of the Greek is incorrect, wouldn’t that be a pretty big blow to his argument?

2. Of course I agree with this point as written. But I think it’s clear that Christ taught about hearts in the here and now because he wanted people to be submitted to God in their hearts. George Eldon Ladd is great on this point in his book, “The Gospel of the Kingdom.” Rob seems to have taken a very bold leap by saying “What Christ meant by what he said was…” in a way that very, very few Biblical scholars agree with. Doesn’t it strike you as problematic for him to be on a somewhat lonely limb on this?

3. Early in the chapter, Rob makes the argument that Jesus was constantly using vivid metaphors to describe things, and says those metaphors don’t necessarily teach us about, say, Hell. But later, Rob says that a vivid metaphor, “it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for you…” is indicative of hope for salvation for Sodom and Gomorrah. Doesn’t this strike you as inconsistent? And doesn’t the passage he refers to (Matthew 10) talk about the severity of rejecting Christ’s apostles rather than hope of salvation for a long-gone town?

4. Is it really so difficult to believe that God is both a redeeming God and a God whose holiness demands justice of those that do not respond to the gospel despite dire warnings? As a father, I can love, offer redemption to, and enact punishment on my son at the same time. And someday, it is possible that I could love him and yet kick him out of the house with no hope of returning unless change happens. Why can’t God hold these emotions, virtues, or qualities simultaneously?

I do believe Rob really thinks he is trying to understand Christ. But why is he so insistent on not listening to, responding to, and being changed by dialogue with theologians and historians who know more than he does? Why can’t he accept challenges? Why does he get to be the independent arbiter of truth?

Kiel Hauck: “the argument should not be made that since Bell is one of a few to question something so many people hold, he must be wrong.”

Ben,
I guess I’ll dive right in by addressing your comments on the four points you brought up.  I’ll start by combining your first two points and addressing them together.

1. and 2. I suppose if his analysis of the Greek could be “proven incorrect” it would be a pretty big blow.  But haven’t people been arguing over the meanings of this dead language for centuries?  Isn’t this why we have so many different Bible translations?  Aren’t they constantly discovering new meanings and usages of Greek words that we didn’t know and understand before?  I’m not a Greek scholar and I haven’t studied the language.  I do know that Rob Bell has, therefore, I’m inclined to at least hear out his explanations on it.  I’m sure there are scholars out there who would argue in the opposite direction.

I’m more concerned with the heart of the points being made.  I truly believe that God isn’t wringing his hands in worry that we won’t be able to translate ancient texts correctly and will thus lose all of the precious knowledge that we are supposed to know.  I think the Holy Spirit transcends that and teaches each of us as God sees fit.  Here’s what I can tell you about hell though:

In “Sex God”, Rob Bell opens the book with imagery of concentration camps in Germany.  This was hell on earth and I don’t think anyone would argue against that.  Fortunately, not everyone has had to experience a concentration camp, but we all experience our own personal hells.  I can tell you first hand that I’ve never felt closer to hell than during the finalization of my divorce papers.  I can also tell you that as awful as that was, I know God cared about my heart in that moment, deeply.

I know that moments like that are not the way the world was meant to be, and if God doesn’t care in moments like that then I have little hope that he cares at all.  This leads me to believe that there will come a day when those moments will be no more and things will be made into the way that they were meant to be and the suffering that we endure will be gone forever.  Perhaps I’m being too bold, but I can tell you that right now – today – I don’t see where a loving God gets gratification from the torment of hells – either here or elsewhere.  And if that’s the case, I have to believe that a day will come when those moments will exist no more.

3.  I was also not convinced by his interpretation of that particular Sodom and Gomorrah text.  I don’t know what to make of it, but I agree – it didn’t make me feel more hopeful.  However, we find in Ezekiel, as pointed out by Bell, that God will “restore the fortunes of Sodom and her daughters” and they will “return to what they were before.”  Reconcile that.  I know I can’t, and reasons like this are why I love this dialogue so much.

Now that the cat’s out of the bag, I might as well be honest and say I don’t know how to make conflicting texts like these make sense.  I do know though, that the texts he presented as being hopeful were pretty convincing (with the exception of the last one, mentioned above).  I don’t know what happens to the Sodom and Gomorrah’s of the world and maybe none of us ever will.  What I do know is that I feel a lot better about being hopeful of God’s redemption than I do about being certain of when, where, and how God’s judgment works – mainly because I don’t think those things are of our concern.

4.  I don’t have children, so it’s hard for me to relate to your illustrations, although I find it difficult to perceive of a circumstance in which you would lovingly kick your son out of the house with no hope of return unless change happens.  Maybe if I’m blessed to be a father someday, I’ll better understand.  But even that isn’t eternal conscious torment, it’s just a break in a relationship.

If we say that a break in a relationship with God results in eternal conscious torment (and I feel like now is as good of a time as any to ask this), how do you feel about that?  I’m not going to lie – it makes me uncomfortable.  It always has.  And this is coming from someone who has VERY close family members and friends in my life who don’t claim Christ.  It’s a very real situation for me and a scary one at that.  It’s even scarier to me to claim some kind of certain decision on the subject, beyond the shadow of a doubt.  Maybe that makes me weak, but I just can’t get there.  Please realize that I’m not trying to be a bother, I’m simply laying myself bare here.

Finally, on the subject of Bell going against the grain of traditional history and thought – here’s something to chew on.  There was a time in Christian history that to claim that all men, regardless of skin color, were created equal by God would have been very much going against the grain of common acceptance of scriptural teachings.  This is one example of hundreds over the course in history where we have been way off and I’m sure that those who spoke against such things were considered heretics and crazy.  I’m not implying that Bell is that guy and this is one of those subjects.  But I am willing to say that the argument should not be made that since Bell is one of a few to question something so many people hold, he must be wrong.  I think history has taught us better than that.  He may be wrong for other reasons, but that shouldn’t be one of them.

Ben Bartlett: “I fear Rob’s version is far too strongly influenced by what he wants the world to be like, rather than responding to whatever God says it is.“

There are a lot of things about God we can’t be perfectly certain of. But I do think it is a mistake to excuse ourselves from trying to carefully understand God’s words, and to then turn and allow ourselves to base the way we live on guesses we have about what God feels or what he may or may not do. If Rob Bell wants to take that stance, that’s fine, but it isn’t the right approach for a person who trusts God’s revelation of himself in Scripture. Christian faith based on the gospel and revealed in the Bible no longer exists the moment we say that what Scripture means by what it says is less important than how we think God feels about something in our own minds. Now, maybe Rob Bell doesn’t believe in that approach, and again that’s fine. I just wish he would say that more clearly.

Certainly there is a lot of suffering in the world, and I hate it too. You and I have had opportunities to talk about many of those elements of suffering in our own lives, and we both hate how the other person has had to suffer. And we’ve both struggled with anger toward God because of it.

I can’t tell you perfectly how God will make all things new, nor can I tell you exactly how his plan will work. But I can say with confidence that at the end of the day, when you compare whatever plan Rob Bell (or anyone else) can conceive for the world to whatever God REALLY has in store, God’s plan will be the better plan. I want my life to be full of the clearest, most honest thinking possible so that I can come as close as possible to understanding the world as God sees it. I fear Rob’s version is far too strongly influenced by what he wants the world to be like, rather than responding to whatever God says it is.

I don’t deny the church has been wrong, many times. But what brought the church BACK from being wrong was a renewed commitment to studying, understanding, and responding to Scripture in faith. The problem with Rob’s approach is that unlike, say, Luther, he is not using Scripture to show people that they have drifted away from a Biblical faith. Instead, he’s using poor arguments, muddled language, and borderline emotional manipulation to cast a vision for the Way We Wish God Was.

Once, my wife and I talked some friends into visiting Michigan with us. On the way home, my friend was driving and I completely forgot to tell him where to turn… instead of heading from Cincinnati to Louisville, we ended up near Frankfort. When we realized our mistake, we were all frustrated (mostly with me, and rightly so). But it didn’t change that fact that though we WANTED to be home, had INVESTED in being home, had TRIED to get home, love the IDEA of being home… we weren’t home. Our desires and reality didn’t match up, and to get to the right place we had to let reality win. For me, the witness of Scripture is the reality of the world, and that has to win out over whatever I wish the world was.

Kiel Hauck: “If you can look at the scriptures concerning hell and be fully convinced that the way you understand hell is completely accurate, I admire you for your convictions.  I look and I see a very blurry picture at best.”

Ben,
I’m not talking about guesses and emotional gushings about what I think is right.  I do believe that God gave us emotions and feelings for a reason, and that they do in fact play into how we view God and understand him.  But let’s not forget this fact that hasn’t yet been stated: Rob Bell used this chapter to address every single use of the word “hell” in the Bible.  And there’s not that many.

To me, it absolutely, positively, has to be addressed that there’s no use of the word in the Hebrew scriptures and only 12 uses of it in the New Testament – mostly by Jesus.  And mostly directed towards the pharisees.  The idea of hell engulfs such a large portion of what so many people understand about God and the afterlife, yet it is mentioned so sparingly in the scriptures and in ways and contexts that don’t seem to match up with how we talk about it.  This goes far beyond guesses and feelings.  To me, it makes clear that the emphasis is NOT on hell and that our understanding of hell very well could be skewed at best, and it’s quite possibly worse than that.

I’m sure that we’ll continue to disagree on that point, but I want to make clear that this is a lot more than just how I feel about it.  Yes, I’m uncomfortable with the idea of hell.  But I also feel like I need more convincing than what we currently have at our disposal.  Perhaps I’m being shortsighted or blinded somehow from the truth of the matter and there’s way more to hell in the scriptures than how I’m currently understanding it.  I strive to know, truly know, the truth in this because I think it matters and I believe it to be important.  If you can look at the scriptures concerning hell and be fully convinced that the way you understand hell is completely accurate, I admire you for your convictions.  I look and I see a very blurry picture at best.  But most of all, I see a message of love and redemption that exists throughout the scriptures far more than a message of condemnation and torment.  But if I’m wrong, I desperately want to be made right.

“I am convinced that we as Christ followers in American churches have embraced values and ideas that are not only unbiblical but that actually contradict the gospel we claim to believe. And I am convinced we have a choice” (3). So Platt begins his book, and he stets us up to experience two things as we read: 1) the reality that Christ’s call to discipleship looks vastly different from the model found in most American churches. Platt wants us to see that Jesus actually calls us to give up, sacrifice, and leave behind the things that this world and that we by nature value so much. He begins in chapter one by exploring some of the more intriguing responses Jesus gives to would-be disciples. He unpacks Luke 9, Mark 10, and Matthew 4 for us and shows us what is lying right before our eyes in the text, but which we have more often than not missed: we do have to give up everything we have to follow Jesus (12). 2) He sets us up to experience the weightiness of saying no to this radical call. Platt warns us, right at the outset here in chapter one, that “the price of our nondiscipleship is high” (15). Platt will go on throughout the book to highlight how our “nondiscipleship” will cost the lost and the poor, but he warns us that it will cost us as well. Platt pulls a Piper here and turns to consider how the pursuit of Jesus leads ultimately to our greatest joy (of course the Bible screams this even more than Piper). He takes us to Matthew 13 and reminds us that Jesus is worth losing everything for. Sell all you own and buy the field with the great treasure, he urges. The book is filled with hard hitting, memorable, and straightforward warnings. Here is just one such example, Platt writes:

If we walk away from the Jesus of the gospel, we walk away from eternal riches. The cost of nondiscipleship is profoundly greater for us than the cost of discipleship. For when we abandon the trinkets of this world and respond to the radical invitation of Jesus, we discover the infinite treasure of knowing and experiencing him (18).

The motivation to join Platt, and his mega-church, on this radical abandonment for Jesus has only just begun.

Platt spends some time in the next chapter reviewing the gospel for readers. He continually, throughout the book, draws a distinction between what he sees of the church in other parts of the world, particularly the underground church in Asia, and the church in America. He points out how their worship gatherings are so vastly different than ours. They don’t have all the amenities and luxuries that our churches have. “God’s Word is enough for millions of believers who gather in house churches just like this one…But is his Word enough for us” (26)? It is Platt’s conviction that if we will truly understand the gospel then we too can find our satisfaction in God’s Word. First, we must understand who God is if we are to rightly understand discipleship.

The gospel reveals eternal realities about God that we would sometimes not rather face. We prefer to sit back, enjoy our clichés, and picture God as a Father who might help us, all the while ignoring God as a Judge who might damn us. Maybe this is why we fill our lives with the constant drivel of entertainment in our culture – and in our church. We are afraid to stop and really look at God in his Word, we might discover he evokes greater awe and demands deeper worship than we are ready to give him (29).

This is the God of Scripture, not the fluffy God of so much modern American theology. Add to this the gospel picture of man as sinful and as rebels against God and we are getting closer to what drives radical discipleship. We are God’s enemies, already condemned because of our disobedience. In light of this, Platt tells us, we must turn to Jesus as our only hope. This is the gospel. “How should we respond to this gospel,” Platt asks. “Suddenly contemporary Christianity sales pitches don’t seem adequate anymore…Our attempt to reduce this gospel to a shrink-wrapped presentation that persuades someone to say or pray the right things back to us no longer seems appropriate” (36-37). The rest of the book, then, unpacks what it means to respond to this gospel biblically and rightly: the unconditional surrender of all that we are and all that we have to all that he is (37).

Chapter three takes us on a journey to meet the end of our own strength. The gospel calls us to live, Platt argues (convincingly), to live in utter and total dependence upon God. The picture in the book of Acts concerning the growth of the church is quite different than the pragmatism and wealth obsessed culture of our churches; Platt does a quick survey of the scenes in Acts to paint the contrast clearly between our dependence on the self and their dependence on God. The difference, he says is the difference between powerful faith and puny faith. “Why would we ever want to settle for Christianity according to our ability or settle for church according to our resources? The power of the one who raised Jesus from the dead is living in us, and as a result we have no need to muster up our own might” (60).

Next, Platt turns our attention outward. Having considered what it looks like internally to be a genuine disciple of Jesus, he points us to consider how that affects our relationship to others. Particularly this chapter focuses on God’s vision of a people from every tribe, tongue, and nation, on the Great Commission. God calls us to action to spread his word with the “4.5 billion people who, if the gospel is true, at this moment are separated from God in their sin and (assuming nothing changes) will spend eternity in hell” (76). If the numbers don’t stir you then consider chapter 5, that the call to make disciples is placed on all of us as a command from Jesus himself. “Disciple making is not a call for others to come to us to hear the gospel but a command for us to go to others to share the gospel. A command for us to be gospel-living, gospel-speaking people at every moment and in every context where we find ourselves” (94).

I am a guy of boxes and systems, of organization and progressive development. I like things structured and in order and so when I began reading chapter 6 it seemed out of place. It didn’t seem to make sense. I think part of the reason for this is that the issue of wealth, which chapter 6 deals with in detail, is taken for granted as an honorable pursuit. Platt spends a great amount of time building a theological case against the pursuit of wealth, looking at both Old Testament and New Testament teachings. The connection to the rest of the book comes, in the words of Platt, as both evidence of my salvation and as an aspect of gospel work. He writes:

Suddenly I began to realize that if I have been commanded to make disciples of all nations, and if poverty is rampant in the world to which God has called me, then I cannot ignore these realities. Anyone wanting to proclaim the glory of Christ to the ends of the earth must consider not only how to declare the gospel verbally but also how to demonstrate the gospel visibly in a world where so many are urgently hungry. If I am going to address urgent spiritual need by sharing the gospel of Christ or building up the body of Christ around the world, then I cannot overlook dire physical need in the process (108-109).

Platt gives us global stats and personal stories to continue the motivation, they are each powerful in their own right. Most powerfully, however, is that he warns us of the danger of overlooking what could be sin in our hearts. “This frightens me. Good intentions, regular worship, and even study of the Bible do not prevent blindness in us. Part of our sinful nature instinctively chooses to see what we want to see and to ignore what we want to ignore. I can live my Christian life and even lead the church while unknowingly overlooking evil” (108).

Chapters 7 and 8 give us two last stirring motivations. The first highlights for us the urgency of the situation, it’s a negative motivation. “There is no plan B,” we are it! “If people are dying and going to hell without ever even knowing there is a gospel, then we clearly have no time to waste our lives on an American dream” (143). Chapter 8 gives us the positive motivation by pointing out, again, that there is great reward in risking it all for Jesus. Dying is gain, Paul said, and Platt builds upon this theology to call us into radical living. “If you and I ever hope to free our lives from worldly desires, worldly thinking, worldly pleasures, worldly dreams, worldly ideals, worldly values, worldly ambitions, and worldly acclaim, then we must focus our lives on another world.” “Your life is free to be radical when you see death as reward” (179).

The book concludes with calling us to specific action. Often reading these types of books can be inspirational, but once the book has been read and re-shelved it becomes nothing more than a fond memory. Platt wants us to act on what we have learned. He invites us to join him and his church on this one year Radical Experiment. It involves reading through the whole Bible, praying for the whole world, sacrificing our money for a specific purpose, spending time in a different context, and committing to a local church family.

This book affected me in deep ways. When I read it I had been wrestling with my own self-indulgence for months, feeling God’s call on me to make serious changes. The problem for me, as I assume it is for most of us, is that I did not know where to begin. Radical provided me with specific targets. Each of his criticisms comes not just with condemnation for specific values and habits of the church but Biblical alternatives. The stories in each chapter from Platt’s own life and from the lives of his church family give concrete pictures of what this looks like. Best of all the work comes off with certainty where it can and humility where it should. Platt does not contend that he has this radical discipleship concept all figured out. He offers qualifiers where necessary, especially in chapters 6 on wealth, but he warns us too that it is easy to justify sin while we overlook the clear teachings of Scripture. The picture he paints of radical discipleship cries out to so many readers because it both gives purpose and freedom, and that is not by Platt’s design, it’s by Jesus’ design.

I don’t know David Platt personally. I have never been to his church, though I have heard great things about it. In fact I have only heard him preach on a few occasions and yet as I read from the pages of Radical I can’t help but feel his genuineness, honesty, humility, and passion come through the pages. Few books that critique the church as boldly as this one come off without being pretentious, Platt has achieved that nicely. In fact, David Platt’s call to radical Christian living doesn’t so much feel like his call. Rather, because his book is saturated in so much Scripture and Biblical-theological thinking, the call to radical Christian living sounds more like Jesus’ call.

It’s been out for a while, but I’ve recently regained interest in the multi-player mode of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. Here’s my thesis: If you’re the kind of person who finds the standard fast-paced, shooter-based multiplayer games overwhelming and or boring, this is for you. Here are some things that set apart Assassin’s Creed’s multiplayer from any other game:

• An emphasis on patience. Sure, you could run full speed for your enemies and kill them flat-out. But you will lose. The game places value on stealth and blending in with the crowd. As someone who is used to more face-paced shooters, I have to get myself into a particular head-space to play AC:Bros well. By the time I’ve played a game for an hour or two, I feel markedly different than I do after playing those other games.
• The presence of the crowd. Unlike other games, you’re attempting to take out your opponents in the presence of a bustling crowd. This creates some really fascinating circumstances. You’re forced to push people out of the way, avoid startling the crowd and creating a scene, and keep from killing innocent people for no reason.
• A secretive and strategic aspect. Playing against a friend can be pretty satisfying for those moments that you both stop talking, only to realize that one was hunting the other. The social aspect is very real and changed in a significant way by the mechanics of the game. Trust and suspicion are always at play.

Bottom line, it’s the perfect antidote to pretty much any other mainstream multi-player game out there. I highly recommend it.

The release of a new film version of Jane Eyre makes this a perfect time to reread—or encounter for the first time—Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel of a “plain” governess who asserts her right to love and be loved. And I speak as someone who doesn’t really like Jane Eyre—or anything written by any Brontë—but who has developed an appreciation for it through the readings of others.

Part of the reason Jane Eyre never really appealed to me was that it was initially billed to me by a friend, when we were both in high school, as “so romantic.” This was never a big selling point for me, but my friend insisted that I read it anyway. I spent most of the book wanting to kick Mr. Rochester—and, by extension, Jane, for not kicking Mr. Rochester herself. Then there was the novel’s relentless lack of humor. The only good bits were the Gothic elements, especially the . . . well, I won’t say what, because I have a long track record of spoiling the plot of Jane Eyre for people (in large part, I assigned it in my Literary Criticism class so that I could talk about certain plot points freely without spoiling the uninitiated).

Jane Eyre as romance never worked for me. However, my students have convinced me to appreciate it as an expression of evangelical confidence in the believer’s right to interpret God’s will for her own life. Many of my students resonated with the part of the novel in which a certain character tries to convince Jane that it is her calling to be a missionary’s wife in India, and that any resistance to this path is selfish disobedience. This character uses scripture repeatedly in his guilt trips against Jane and tells her that he is praying for her—the ultimate tool of the manipulative Christian—because her spirit is willing, but her flesh is weak. To this, Jane replies, “My spirit is willing to do what it right; and my flesh, I hope, is strong enough to accomplish the will of Heaven, when once that will is distinctly known to me. “

Jane stands her ground against spiritual manipulation, instead waiting to hear directly from God. As it turns out, God does use a supernatural occurrence to make his will known to Jane, and that will is very different from that suggested for her by others.

The question of discerning God’s will is, of course, a complex one, but few are the novels that even begin to address it. The Jane Eyre that is about spiritual discernment is far more interesting than the swooning-on-the-moors Jane Eyre, and I’m grateful to my students for introducing me to this Jane.

My suspicion is that the new film will gloss over the discernment theme in Jane Eyre, though it does apparently give more screen time than previous films to the character who claims to know God’s will for Jane. The movie may not be opening outside of New York and Los Angeles for a while—I know it’s not opening in Charleston for another month—but that gives you plenty of time to read the novel beforehand. If you’re into audiobooks, the free download of Jane Eyre on librivox.org is decently read (with a faux British accent). And, once you’ve read Jane Eyre, you can then start in on Jasper Fforde’s hilarious novel The Eyre Affair, which supplies all the humor that the original lacks.

My copy was provided for review by the WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group. I enjoyed Hear No Evil but I expected I would. I will say I think my mom would like it and I’d even recommend it to my non-believing music snob friends. Will it change your life? Only The Secret can do that but this will make you laugh and think.

You can download the first chapter here then go here to purchase it.

I talked with Matthew recently about the book, as well as, his thoughts on honesty, humor, and a whole host of other hot and/or holy topics.

I understand that you’ve recently returned from Uganda. Would you say that your experience, meeting and talking with several Ugandans, enables you to better act as advocate for them?

MPT: Yes, of course. Anytime you experience firsthand a person’s story, you are much better equipped to speak on their behalf, and to encourage others to speak up, too.

What music did you hear while you were in Uganda?

MPT: Most of the music I heard was a mix of singing with various instruments of percussion. The music they sang and danced to was birthed out of their culture and rooted in their history. It was lively, expressive, sexy, and at the same time, very worshipful.

What role does music serve in the lives of people there?

MPT: From what I could tell, making music seemed to be their entertainment, a way to celebrate community, and of course, a way for them to worship God and proclaim his truth.

In Hear No Evil you tell the continuing story of your departure from fundamentalism, a theme first explored in Churched. Growing up, you learned to keep your preference for Michael W. Smith and Amy Grant hush-hush as CCM possession likely warranted excommunication.

When did you decide “enough is enough” and that for better or worse you had to be honest about yourself including your personal views and musical preferences?

MPT: Freedom has come in stages–through conversations, prayer, meditation, experiences. For most kids who grew up in Christian fundamentalism and took the processes seriously, the journey to freedom is slow and hard. Most times when I ran into a new idea or experience, a war broke out in my head. I tend to be an over thinker, and so anything new made my head spin with questions and fears, but also curiosity. Sometimes one lesson came in stages. Healing from spiritual abuse is a process, one that you begin over again many times.

How do you distinguish between that kind of honesty and having no shame?

MPT: Good question. I think balancing honesty and shame and grace is a journey. Most Christians are well-equipped for feeling a certain amount of shame–the honesty and grace is the hard part.

I often say, “Truth is absolute. Our understanding is tenuous.” You’ve expressed uncertainty about such doctrines as hell and inerrancy of scripture. What are you certain of?

MPT: I suppose I’m certain of the same things that each of us are certain of, the human and tangible stuff that all of us experience each and every day. Now, I believe that Jesus–his life, death, and resurrection–is the hope for the world. That’s what I center my faith around, that God through Jesus will make all things new. And that, as his follower, I’m supposed to be a part of that “new.” But I don’t think faith is about certainties. No matter how loud we proclaim what we believe “truth” to be, none of us fully know “truth.” Sure, I believe there are absolute truths. But as much as America’s Christian culture would love to put God and Jesus and faith into human equations or make them into science projects, you can’t. And to me, that’s not faith. A big part of faith in Jesus is about becoming okay with life’s uncertainties, spiritual or otherwise. It’s not about being right.

In what sense is being wrong a concern?
I’m not concerned, mostly because my faith isn’t built on “being right.”

What do you admire about fundamentalists? What advice do you have for them?

MPT: You know, this a difficult question, mostly because of the word “fundamentalist.” It’s one thing for me to describe the people who attended my childhood church as fundamentalists–we liked being called that and, too, I was one of them–but I’ve learned (and am still learning) that my labeling of people is often unfair. And I’m guilty of labeling people, and defining somebody based on MY definition of that label. My goal is to see an individual as a human being, first and foremost. I desire to admire people because of their stories, and furthermore, because God loves them. Is that difficult to do sometimes? Sure, because sometimes I’m convinced, based on the experiences of my past, that I already know and understand the person I deem a “fundamentalist.” That’s more often my issue and not theirs. More than any other group of people, the “Christian fundamentalist” has hurt me and hurt the people I love.

If I was to offer any advice, it would simply be this: Rules and conservative values are fine as long as they don’t cripple one’s ability to love God and love people. For me, that lifestyle did limit my ability to love God and people. But that’s my story… not everybody’s.

Understanding that it is a process, have you been able to forgive them?

MPT: I’m on a good path toward forgiving people, yes. Oddly, human forgiveness sometimes ebbs and flows. But for the most part, I really do believe I’ve made amends with the people in my past. But I do still deal with the effects.

Has your family experienced the same healing?

MPT: Yes, but each of us in a different way. One of my older sisters is still very much involved in a fundamentalist church. And she loves it. She and I get along great because we don’t talk about how we differ, we focus on what we share and what we have in common.

Read part 2 of this interview, in which Matthew discusses humor, the nature of writing memoir, and why he’s such a jerk on Twitter.

Get more of Matthew at his blog or follow him on Twitter @JesusNeedsNewPR

According to James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, American Christianity’s relationship to culture, high and low, in the past fifty years has been almost exclusively cerebral (without necessarily being intellectual). In essence, American evangelicals have been repeating the word “brain” over and over, without attention to how culture—and how spiritual formation of the human person—happens. Hunter argues that Christians have almost uniformly adopted the view that “the essence of culture is found in the hearts and minds of individuals”—or the “values” or the “worldviews.” Whatever the vocabulary used, the basic assumption has been that, if you want to change the culture, you must change each individual’s mind until a majority comes to adopt more Christlike ideas.

As Hunter boldly argues, “This account is almost wholly mistaken.”

First, the “hearts and minds” approach relies too much on an Enlightenment notion of disembodied ideas as the forces shaping culture. (Hunter is not alone in this argument, as it also forms the backbone of James K. A. Smith’s 2009 book Desiring the Kingdom. Again, neither Hunter nor Smith is advocating anti-intellectualism: in fact, they’re drawing on the best of postmodern theory to critique Enlightenment idealism and the church’s complicity with it.) Second, culture does not operate by the rule of the majority: it is, in fact, “eerily independent of majority opinions.” Instead, Hunter insists, cultures change from the top down, and those initiating change are elites with significant cultural capital. Any attempt to change culture through popular opinion is woefully naïve.

So, if Christians want to change culture, that means that we should simply work to get people into the highest positions of power, right? Stop focusing our attempts on subculture-centric efforts and instead work to dominate Capitol Hill, the Ivy Leagues, and Hollywood.

Not so fast. As those influenced by the Anabaptist tradition (or, as Hunter calls it, the “Neo-Anabaptist” tradition of John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas), cultural dominance isn’t what Jesus enjoined his followers to seek. In fact, Jesus was strangely unconcerned about cultural dominance, as were early Christians until Constantine accomplished the unholy marriage of Christianity and empire.

At Wheaton, through no fault of the college itself (I love Wheaton and remain extremely grateful for my education there), I had absorbed deep into my being the belief that I had to achieve excellence in, well, everything, in order to be a good witness for Jesus. As a young graduate student, I read Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus for the first time. That was when it hit me: I didn’t have to win everything for Jesus (and, in fact, thinking that I could do so was a bit prideful). Voluntary relinquishment of power and prestige could honor him, too. For a high-achieving perfectionist, this idea was liberating. Given the influence of the Neo-Anabaptists in my own faith, I was particularly curious to see what Hunter would have to say about them.

In Hunter’s view, the Neo-Anabaptists do provide some valuable correctives to both conservative and liberal Christians who seek to dominate culture through political means (Hunter takes to task equally James Dobson and Jim Wallis). However, the Neo-Anabaptists have an insufficient theology of culture, particularly as regards work or vocation. Furthermore, the Neo-Anabaptist allergy to power shares with the Christian Right and the Christian Left the false emphasis on politics as the only significant public realm.

Power is inevitable; even in seeking to avoid it, we re-acknowledge its importance. Hunter seems to suggest that Christians should neither especially seek cultural power nor seek to reject it: instead, we should participate in culture in response to God’s creation mandate, regardless of the influence of our work. At all levels of culture, from the popular to the elite, Christians should be living out “faithful presence,” which entails “a recognition that the vocation of the church is to bear witness to and to be the embodiment of the coming Kingdom of God.”

An appropriate subtitle for To Change the World would probably be “Never Mind. You Have Better Reasons for Participating in Culture.” The actual subtitle, “The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World,” is partially explained in passages like this one:

“The tragedy is that in the name of resisting the internal deterioration of faith and the corruption of the world around them, many Christians—and Christian conservatives most significantly—unwittingly embrace some of the most corrosive aspects of the cultural disintegration they decry. By nurturing its resentments, sustaining them through a discourse of negation toward outsiders, and in cases, pursuing their will to power, they become functional Nietzcheans, participating in the very cultural breakdown they so ardently strive to resist.”

There’s the tragedy and the irony. What about the possibility? My husband, who also read the book, got a little frustrated with the fact that a good three-quarters of it focus on showing why current Christian models of culture are all wrong. As an academic and a person by nature overly fond of analysis and critique, I didn’t mind this emphasis. However, if you’re looking for a practical how-to guide for enacting faithful presence, To Change the World probably isn’t the book for you.

While Hunter does offer a few practical examples of faithful presence lived out, my imagination was more captured by his use of Jeremiah 29:4-7—you know, the passage that would actually give some context for that oft-quoted Jeremiah 29:11. Hunter implies that this passage has relevance for how Christians should live in the pluralistic, late modern world:

“The premise of Jeremiah’s message was that the exiles would be in Babylon for several generations . . . The Israelites would simply need to come to terms with this fact. It was toward this end that Jeremiah counseled his community not to be nostalgic for the past, for the past could not be recovered. Nor did he advise them to plan for insurrection, for there was no promise of their restoration to Jerusalem, at least not any time soon. Nor yet was the community’s survival tied to the remnant that remained in Jerusalem (Jer. 24:5-10). For Jeremiah, exile did not mean that God had abandoned Israel. Rather, exile was the place where God was at work.”

Hunter continues:

“Jeremiah’s guidance was even more counterintuitive than it might first seem. If God’s purposes really were being realized through these circumstances, then the welfare of the Babylonian conquerors was linked to their own welfare. To this end, Jeremiah instructs the Jews in exile to ‘seek the welfare’ of their captors, to pray for the very people who destroyed their homeland, for the welfare of the exiles and the captors were bound together. As they pursued the shalom of Babylon, God would provide shalom for his people.”

In other words, instead of bemoaning the mythical past of a supposedly Christian nation, we should buck up, realize that we’re in exile, and get on with honoring God by working toward the common good.

I would love to see other writers take this idea of culture-making in exile and run with it. As it is, To Change the World offers just enough of a hint of the possibility of Christianity in the late modern world that readers won’t be left mired in the tragedy and irony.