Mitch Albom Caught Lying Again

You can read about it over at King Kaufman. (Though you have to watch that stupid "Revelations" commercial. Fuck. The apocalypse had a fucking end, but do shows about the apocalypse end? Nooooo. Though, now that this show is spending millions to turn ordinary objects into crosses and outlines of the Virgin Mary on TV, will the blowhards who claim to speak for the red states finally clam up about how Hollywood never reflects their values? Ha. Ha. Silly me. Give up a tool that shakes down the rednecks? I'll gladly bite my tongue, Mr. Van Impe, thanks.) Apparently, Albom made up a story about a couple of college players at the NCAA tournament getting together to share kitchy memories of their college careers. This is obviously a naughty thing to do in journalism and shame on him. Still, I'll leave it to those in his profession to give him the heavy pistol whipping he deserves for this crime.

I prefer to beat him up for his incursions into my domain. I don't usually pummel bestselling authors, primarily because it opens me to charges of sour grapes. Beyond that I recognize that developing a commericially viable, freshly familiar piece of fiction for the airplane and beach set is a skill that merits its share of respect. This is especially true of someone who is able to do it over and over. These are the people who keep the publishing industry running for would-be midlisters like me, and I give them grudging props for it.

Still...

What Albom writes is codswollop. Pure, 100%, dyed-in-the-wool crap. "Tuesdays with Morrie" and "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" cheaply sentimentalize the deaths of old people in ways so gooey that the words should have been poured over pancakes instead of paper. To Albom, apparently, death is kind of like the last pages of a math book, the place where all of life's answers reside. (If not for you, then at least for the people who show up once a week to hang out with you to absorb your wonderful social conscience even as they cross picket lines. If the character in TWM had crossed picket lines, the book would have contained a useful irony to cut the treacle, but no. It was Mitch Albom, not his alter ego, who crossed.) This he combines, much like talking-to-corpses huckster John Edward, with the idea that the dead are happy to be dead, that they've learned their lives were good, that their feelings of regret lack justification, and that where they thought they were foolish they were in fact wise. So not only is death the last pages of a math book, it's the last pages of a math book where we turn out to be right, even with the problems we weren't sure about at the time. This is, to me, one of the worst cliches in all of fiction. It eliminates from fiction the central tension needed for fiction to work--the possibility that the character might fail, might be wrong.

What's at stake for an Albom character, really? If he's old, he's pretty much guaranteed to die somewhere in the text, and he's pretty much guaranteed to be enobled in the process. It works commercially because we're all going to die and we all desperately want to believe that all the confusions and contradictions we've suffered during our breathing period will be resolved to our satisfaction in the end. Still, if that's how life works out, what exactly are the risks? What's the difference between dying in an attempt to save a child from an amusement park accident at 83 and croaking from a massive heart attack while snorkeling in the Bahamas at the age of 46? We're all working from the same math book, so we'll all get the same answers. And, once again, we're always right, even when we think we're wrong. If everybody's right and good and moral and noble and ultimately without reason for doubt, what's the point?

In writing what he does, Albom betrays the very heart of what makes fiction a meaningful art form, and chooses to do so in the name of fiction. Instead of lying in the service of truth, he lies in order to convince us of bigger lies. His fiction aims to tell us that there are no problems, that all is well, and that we are all good in more or less the same way. If these things were true, there would be no need for fiction, or for art.

To wrap this I offer the words of a much finer artist: Tom Stoppard (from "Arcadia"):

"It's all trivial--your grouse, my hermit, Bernard's Byron. Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise, we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final."