Is a Call of the Wild a Good Thing for Humans?

Just read Jack London's The Call of the Wild again. This book is great on many levels. But in my middle age I seem to enjoy taking these classic books to deeper levels, and perhaps finding some insights into what is going on in our own times.

It's a book written in third person but most decidedly from the dog Buck's point of view. Interestingly, he is more of a person than a dog, the author giving all sorts of human attributes and feelings to him: pride, greed, pity, bravery, loyalty, morality, not that dogs don't possess or tend toward some of these.

A strong, domesticated dog, descended from the wolf, given the circumstances, might degenerate into a wild animal if given the chance in the wilderness of Alaska, no harm done. London himself said The Call of the Wild was a story about a dog devolving. Was he also asking a question about human beings? For a human being, is a call to the wild side of life a good thing or not? Will it cause harm?

There is a quirky movie from 1968 called Wild in the Streets. It is about young people taking over the world according to their hedonistic whims and putting everybody over the stodgy age of 30 in nature camps where they are kept drugged and lethargic. The end of the movie hints at what is going to happen when the hippies in charge start to become tiresome and the 12-year-olds decide to take over. 

My mind turns to the developments in Seattle, Washington happening as I write, where a group of disillusioned people have taken over a section of the city and declared it to be an independent nation, at the same time making all sorts of  unrealistic and irrational and outrageous demands of the state of Washington. These include releasing all sorts of prisoners from jails,removing historical materials relating to the Civil War, providing free food and sanitary facilities for them, black doctors for black patients, and abolishing the Seattle police department. Such whims based on incomplete information and shallow thinking and ignorance end up doing the very opposite of what may have been sincerely intended. It's Lord of the Flies all over again, an anarchy void of wisdom, leadership, high purpose, ideals, and justice, to name a few principles necessary to civilized society.

Sometimes authors are deeper than we think. And sometimes they stumble on eternal truths that are almost impossible to miss if you care at all about reality and human nature. 

I Learned to Swim in the Ocean

Someone said: You will never have a better friend than a friend who points you to Christ. This is the goal of Tidal Wave Books' I Learned to Swim in the Ocean by me, Janice Graham, just off the presses January 2020.

The labor of love has been a long time coming; I started writing it in 2004. Set against my earliest Pacific island childhood memories, this book is a sink-or-swim adventure toward faith in Christ on a tidal wave of trial and truth. It could be called memoir, autobiographical, inspirational, literary, but above all, it's about conversion/coming to Christ. And who doesn't like to revisit childhood, anybody's childhood? C. S. Lewis said, "I never read an autobiography in which the parts devoted to the earlier years were not far the most interesting."And yes, that's me in the 1956 photo above.

As I finished up writing this book---I don't think I ever really wanted to finish it, it was such a joy to me to write about things that are good and true and beautiful---a thought occurred to me. I discussed it at length with my husband. It is something like this. There is a difference between books that are portrayed as true (as in real events, people, places) and books that are portrayed as fiction (made up out of the imagination). (There are some that meet in the middle, being historical fiction, that is, a made up story set in a real place surrounded by real events/people.) Both nonfiction and fiction can contain great truths and profound wisdom. But people seem to really care about that distinction. Case in point: Remember the wildly popular book, The Education of Little Tree? I think it was one of those bestsellers Oprah highlighted on her TV show. Well, it was promoted as autobiographical. As a true story. Like the author was really raised by his Indian grandfather. It was a treasure and everybody loved it, that is until it came out that it was a work of fiction. Same book, same good story, same wisdom, same writing. But people don't like to be lied to. They don't like hoaxes. The book went on a proverbial black list and the author was defamed, albeit after his death. Another case in point: In a book group years ago we read A Girl Named Zippy. The cover had a baby girl photo on it. I was the only one in the group who thought it was too good to be true. It seemed contrived, overblown, trying too hard to be cute and funny. It bothered me as I read; I couldn't help thinking the author embellished some or all of it.

My surmise from all this was that no matter how good the book is, fiction or nonfiction, if you pretend at it your story will be discredited---sometime, for someone, to some degree. I was hoping I hadn't pretended anything in my book, not even the slightest feeling or detail. I knew that at least I had tried my best not to, come what may. I had checked with my mother on the childhood facts. I was very careful not to exploit anything for convenience or effect. There were some temptations, so I get it. I get how authors can get carried away. I hope I didn't. Be that as it may, I like it best of all the things I've written.

This book is not only based on my memories, but on my beliefs, some of which were long in coming. You might call it a Christian take on Anne Morrow Lindbergh's secular Gift from the Sea, 1955. It's meant to be an easy, flowy read, but not a shallow one. I like to say I have some big names backing me up on the deep ideas presented in my book, as in Plato, John Locke, Dostoevsky, William James, Flannery O'Connor, and C. S. Lewis, to name just a few. After a lot of indecision I included conversational end notes for those who wish for more information on the classic works I cite. (I am one who thinks end notes are an added delight in the books I read; there they are just waiting to enlighten me further if I want them.)


Please be patient while the TWB website (tidalwavebooks.com) is being revamped; in the meantime you can order the book by sending an email to sgraham@mstar.net. It's $19.95. Free audio book is also in the works.

Note 2/5/2020 This book is now also available on Amazon and at Hide Away Books in American Fork, Utah. And of course for lending at Blue Hill Books in my Little Free Library. 

Finn vs. Finch

About Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I have read this book three or four times. It is fine on any level, but I really wanted to understand it better this time because I was reading it in the context of my Lifetime Reading Plan. I knew I had to have some help. Right after I read it I listened to the Hillsdale College lectures---again. They have wonderful free courses, two on Great Books, which include the best lecture I ever heard, about this book or perhaps about anything, and several lectures on this book in a course all on Mark Twain. All excellent, and answered all my questions and more. I took tons of notes.

I would like to argue that this book is the greatest American novel, and maybe the greatest novel period. For one thing, even just literarily, it is completely unique. I mean, the whole thing is told by an uneducated homeless boy in the vernacular, and it's beautiful prose and it works! But there is much more. Maybe a good way to make my argument would be to compare it to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which was just voted the greatest American read on some online contest thing. I actually voted for To Kill a Mockingbird, as American and a great read. I have always loved it. But it is not the best book. (It may be the best movie, though.)

We love Mockingbird to this day because it is sentimental and full of warm, vivid, childhood ambience and adventure, plus it seems to expose the evils of racism. The book was a huge success at least partly because of the civil rights movement happening around that time. Through it we Americans get mass cultural revenge on our dark past and any evil enduring prejudice against black people. It centers around a lawyer in a racist southern town who dares to defend a black man being wrongly accused of raping a white girl. He loses the case and the black man is killed trying to escape from jail. Tragic, and all because of evil white people and group bigotry. So Mockingbird is about a favorite and never-ending social injustice, all set against the coming-of-age of Scout Finch, the lawyer’s young daughter who in the end learns not about universal human nature, good and bad, but about sympathy and understanding for downtrodden people, including Boo Radley, the recluse next door who ultimately comes to her and her brother’s rescue. She resolves never to be hateful or prejudiced and to believe ultimately in human goodness. And that’s about it. It stops dreadfully short of anything transcendent. Nobody changes. There is no redemption. We are shown no weighty universal truths. It just seems to be saying that some people are treated unfairly and we all just need to be nice, which in some senses isn’t always true either. We must stand for right and against wrong. Sometimes that means people have to be corrected or restrained or punished or jailed. I just read Go Set a Watchman, the newly released sequel, which people do not like at all. Why? Because it fills in the deeper realities of Atticus Finch and his town. It talks about having to deal with unsolvable problems. I think the editors and publishers took a lot of the reality out of Mockingbird in order to sell it. And sell it they certainly did! They knew the nature of the mass readership. People don’t want to be unsettled. They don’t want to think that deeply. They just want to be entertained and their popular current perceptions bolstered.

What is Huck Finn about? It takes place before the civil war and chronicles the many and various and outlandish adventures of a cast off boy and a runaway slave as they make their way down the Mississippi River. But at its core it’s not about adventurous boyhood and it’s not about slavery. It is about the shared nature of all human beings and one person’s internal struggle to go against social norms he has found out in his “grinding conscience” are very wrong. In other words, Huck discovers, through his many experiences with Jim, that Jim is a full human being equal if not better than himself, though not perfect, and that it’s wrong for people to be owned like property, which is completely opposite of everything he has ever known. At one point he even thinks he will have to go to hell for helping Jim get free!

This is the story of one person against the moral universe surrounding him and his decision to do the right thing, come what may. Even religion was no help because it had become more and more a merely social institution of codified rules and practices, rather than helping people become more  humble and godly inside. It’s one of the truly great stories of redemption, about a huge change in a person’s heart and belief system, and how there is no going back. In the very end of the book Huck had no choice but to “light out for the territories” because he had tried  “sivilization” and couldn’t stand it.

Mockingbird is charming and emotionally and politically charged, but compared to Huck Finn is purely sociological, somewhat small minded, and incomplete. (Maybe Harper Lee’s original manuscript was better.) While both may explore the complexities of traditions and societal norms and the morality of human behaviors aside from prejudices, Finn is also about thinking man’s internal conflicts, what motivates his choices, the mighty change of heart, human nature, and timeless universal truths.

There are several reasons people criticize Twain’s masterpiece. They did when he first wrote it. They said it had bad grammar, was vulgar, and portrayed bad morals. Today they ban it because it reminds people of a horribly shameful era in America’s past and uses the N word.

Many people, including me, are disturbed by the protracted denouement, when Tom shows up and concocts no end of pranks and tricks to make freeing Jim a grand heroic adventure. Yes, this is quite cruel and people say it’s a huge flaw in the book. It’s not how books are supposed to end, they say. Tom finds the hardest ways to do all sorts of unnecessary antics, just for fun, playing games with a very serious issues, people’s sanity and a man’s freedom. Huck tries to dissuade him, but is intimidated because Tom is well-brought up and educated and must know what’s best, unlike himself. And then it turned out Jim had been freed by Miss Watson in her will and was free all along and Tom knew it, which makes all of Tom’s falderal even more disgusting. This has always bothered me and been an unsatisfactory ending. But now that I’ve thought about it, I think this is Twain’s way of showing that Huck didn’t have the means to change society, and neither do we as ordinary individuals. It can be cruel and horrible and bad and stupid and downright silly. But we can embark on that spiritual journey down that big river and let God change us and learn to do the right things for the right reasons. Even when the whole world is wrong around us, we can all be Huckleberry Finns.

Maybe Twain in Huckleberry Finn is saying one person can't ever really make the wicked world a better place, but he can become a better human being, while To Kill a Mockingbird is saying let's just be nice to everyone and that will solve every terrible sociological problem. It's the difference between rock-hard reality and wishful fluff, however poignant and entertaining.

I think Twain's book has never been fully understood except by a very few. I have tried to understand it better this time, but it is very big. That’s why I had to write so much down in my notes. Some say Twain merely stumbled on some eternal truths larger than he supposed. But I tend to think he knew just what he meant to say, and it is pure genius.

The Giant of all Novels

 Dear Friendishkalayas,

So I read Tolstoy's War and Peace at last---the whole thing! One, one, one, zero pages. (I’ve seen mass market paperback editions of this book with over 1500 pages.) Not that the number of pages matters so much . . . unless there are over a thousand! I read that since there are 365 chapters (all pretty short), you can read this book in a year by reading a chapter a day. Well, I didn't want to take a year, but it did take me some months, just because it was so daunting and I took breaks by reading many other lighter books simultaneously. I mean, even the pages were dense, with small print. I timed myself once and it took me over 2 minutes to read each page. Isn’t a page only supposed to take one minute? Plus, I found myself rereading a lot because I wasn’t paying enough attention and it was important to keep all the characters straight. And I didn’t even spend any time underlining like I usually do because I had a borrowed book–- a nice trade paperback instead of my mass market copy.  My daughter sold me on reading the trade paperbacks: they are bigger and heavier but are made of better paper, stay open better, more space between the lines, hold up better. Also, I wanted that copy so I could more easily use my nifty book holder (my thumb joints really hurt when I hold a book for any length of time, ever since reading 80 books that one year).

One thing you have to get quickly used to when reading Russian authors is their way of assigning innumerable endearing nicknames to everyone. Shortening, lengthening, changing a name completely, you name it.  If you don’t go with that, you’ll never know who anyone is.

In spots I thought this book was the Moby Dick of the Napoleonic war with Russia in 1805—. It was written fifty years after the war actually happened. I didn’t follow the general war intrigues very well. But he didn’t stay too long there; he wrote mostly about the actual individuals involved, their motives and movements and the details of what happened to them in the trenches in quiet times and in battles, and then always going back and forth from the war to the peace pretty regularly. The title is exactly right on. It’s about these certain interconnected people/families (aristocrats) whose young men joined up with the war and then also these individuals’ and families’ lives outside the war stuff: at home, family relations, private life, private thoughts and aspirations–good and bad, romances, marriages, children, money, mistakes, sins, selfishness, selflessness, handling estates and serfs, deaths, births, heartbreak, happiness, changes of heart . . . even  heaven. I could see why Prince Andrey’s slow death is famous in all of literature.

I disagree with Fadiman’s assessment of this gigantic novel in some ways. (Fadiman who wrote The Lifetime Reading Plan which I am in the middle of. ) I don’t  think Tolstoy was all in love with his characters or the grand spectacle of life. I think he was disgusted with a big portion of  humanity. He had at least some of his main characters very critically examining themselves, and was very critical of humanity itself, of blindly worshiped leaders, and of historians specifically. Throughout the book he goes off on these topics, and particularly the last 30 pages are a tortured treatise on what it means to be human, what war is and how it happens, why leaders get to be leaders and what they really are, what history is for, how inaccurate it is, and so on. He was obviously a serious historian himself and it bugged him to no end how historians are too lazy to search out and record what really happened and instead always come to the easiest conclusions all tied with a neat little bow. He says this happens in all disciplines or fields of study, including science, owing to people’s self-serving motives or laziness. For a simple example in this book of history being oversimplified or misrepresented, according to Tolstoy, the great capital city of Moscow was not intentionally razed by the invading French; it was just the result of strangers of all ilks occupying and living day to day in the deserted city (the Russians had mostly fled) and being careless with cooking and smoking and garbage and such, not caring enough to put out any fires that started, which ended up burning practically the whole place down. This is what humans can do! He also talks about how battles were not necessary, or were not necessarily won or lost, how leaders were not necessarily heroic, how soldiers were not necessarily informed and did lots of things on their own, how things happened that shouldn’t have happened all because of carelessness, thoughtlessness, blind ambition, greed, in fact, all those seven deadly sins. War (and even peace if you can call it that) are extremely messy because of human temptation, sin, and stupidity. Much messier than we are led to, or want to, believe.

Tolstoy was a genius. I did want to underline some very important passages. One was about how a man eats a meal and that is sufficient for nutrition; his body is not made to eat two meals at once and that extra food would be wasted or do harm. He said marriage is like that. It is made for one man and one woman to procreate children and anything more or less (more than one man or more than one woman) would be superfluous and good for nothing and ruins the whole thing. Funny how most people knew this 200 years ago, but don’t realize it now! How many kinds of families are held up as ideal today! A little time is going to tell what havoc this departure from reality and truth and rightness will cause.

I want to get a new book just out called The Diversity Delusion I’ve been hearing about on the radio. The author, just like C. S. Lewis said, says we are going to self-destruct if we stay on this juggernaut proliferated in our universities which are bent on annihilating/recharacterizing the values and riches and wisdom accumulated by centuries of  western civilization. Who do people think they are—suddenly deciding that everyone who went before was stupid and their enduring life work suddenly worthless compared to what certain ignorant and strongly uninformed people living now are saying? As Euripides said, “What brashness has the human heart? How far will it push?”

Thank you, Tolstoy, for recording the human experience as you observed it. You got it right.

And now you have my War and Peace of a blog post!

Am I the Only Person Who Does Not Care For Potato Peel Pie???

A couple of readers have mentioned the new Netflix movie, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society Netflix movie just out. I read the book almost ten years ago when it was all the book club rage and wrote about it. Here is my take from back then if you are interested, from my Jan's Journal blog. And no, there is no copy of this book in my Blue Hill Books little lending library.

August 24, 2009

I am staying with my daughter who is expecting triplets and saw a fun-looking book on her dresser, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. So I read it. It seems like everyone has read it and loves it. But I didn't. It was clever and all but the more I read the less I liked it. Which sort of annoys me because of the time invested. Here are some of the problems:

1. Oversentimental. I don't know why I hate this. Maybe it's just bad writing. The word maudlin comes to mind.
2. Exploitive. It uses the tragedies of wartime as the setting for a cutsey book. My dad was a veteran of WWII and a POW. He saw what it was like. And he didn't think Hogan's Heros (the TV comedy about a Nazi prison camp, 1965-71) was at all funny. Alongside the humor, the authors use fictional (?)war atrocities to manipulate the reader. I don't know. This bugged me, too. And yet I like historical fiction. This just didn't sound genuine. It sounded opportunistic.
3. Unrealistic. Try contrived. Stretched. Predictable. The little hints the authors dropped along the way added up until . . . how convenient! The perfectly wonderful childhood friend/editor guy is homosexual and THAT'S why the perfect couple will never marry. Duh. I'm pretty sick of "the most wonderful guy turning out to be gay so the most wonderful girl can marry the unassuming underdog" scenario. It's just too neat. And phony. The whole phony gay thing is used and overused because it gives greedy authors a whole new direction to twist the plot. It's getting mighty old. And that's just ONE of several too-convenient little twists in this book. Sort of like how kids in junior high always write fantastical stories that -- Surprise! -- end up being a dream all along. Which brings me to--
4. Anachronistic. As in historically incorrect. This story is happening in 1946. I'm pretty sure that in 1946 having a child out of wedlock and homosexuality were pretty much looked down upon by practically everybody as social ills. Even the people acting out. Hello! I really hate it when people assign the social trends of today to characters and events that happened in a completely different time, as in assigning an acceptance of sexual immorality to a time when mainstream society upheld traditional values. It makes me think such authors are misled, uneducated, have an agenda, or all of the above.
5. Demonizes religion. This is another trendy tactic that's getting really old. This book would have you think that one of the very few bad, crazy, hateful characters in the story was, you guessed it, a CHRISTIAN. Never mind the NAZIS who happened to be occupying the island and oppressing its inhabitants. The authors made the only openly religious character a horrible person whom everyone couldn't stand and made fun of. That's not only anachronisitic but pathetically politically correct. I personally have never known a single hateful Christian (hateful because of their religion). Have you? They simply are not as commonplace as our modern culture would have us think.
6. Shallow, unbelievable characters. Yes. All the good guys and girls are way better people than everybody else, so good as to be perfect except of course for their adorable, endearing, trite little eccentricities which are supposed to make us love them all the more. Gag. Perfect characters end up being predictable, flat, and boring. We don't remember them or learn anything from them.
7. Self-Serving. This is a book written by writers about a fictional writer/heroine, obviously glorifying her for all that she is: smarter, better, more observant, and just plain more wonderful than any other living being. Ugh. Oh, what a noble existence and calling! it says between the well-penned, name-dropping, literary snob-tainted lines. Ordinary people -- strangers--, at the mere thought of a writer being interested in them, write her effusive personal letters for her writing project and cannot contain their joy when she condescends to visit their island, whereupon they roll out the elegantly quirky and homey red carpet. And then they all fall even more in love with each other and the islanders give up the unbelievably darling, quirky (of course) orphaned child for her to legally adopt. Yeah. Sure.

"Please, no," I found myself muttering out loud here and there.

What I liked about the book? It was written entirely in letters. I like those. They are clever and fun. I just finished rereading Daddy Long-Legs which was delightful. My daughter Cami and I play book games sometimes. Once we tried to name all the books we know written in letters. Too bad this book was made of letters that felt forced and predictable.

Here's something funny. One of those adorably quirky characters actually mentions that good books ruin you for bad ones. Well, yeah. Too bad the authors stuck that in there, never supposing from their perceieved ivory tower that some reader might think THEIR book was one of those bad ones. Oops.

Okay, I'm done. Sorry if I was harsh. But people who write books open themselves up to criticism. And I do wish readers would think more critically.

It's a Crime if You Don't Read Dostoevsky

I first read Crime and Punishment in high school and again some time later but I had forgotten a lot of the details. This book  can be very thought-provoking. Its shows so clearly and convincingly how a person can get wrong ideas in their head and brood on them and get arrogant about them and then actually do them. What a mess was Raskolnikov! An utter mess. It seems the author even in those days (mid-1800s) was worried about the Godless nihilism taking over the universities, and saw how prideful young students, otherwise quite sane, could experiment on it, taking it to grave limits. But then, he shows how this will never do, how we know in our hearts there are some right and wrong absolutes, how rebelling against God and His goodness just because you dare to could end up driving a person crazy. I like how even though Raskolnikov does the legal right thing turning himself in days after he committed the horrendous crime of murdering two woman with an axe (most all of the book takes place within nine days), it takes him another year in Siberia to actually repent or have any real change of heart. He was that indoctrinated and arrogant and angry. I’m sure this book is not popular these days. It is all about right and wrong, sin and repentance.


Here are some highlights:
p 450 when comfort is preached as the aim of life
p 471 Nothing in the world is harder than speaking the truth and nothing easier than flattery.
p 538 (the other convicts fear him because he doesn’t believe in God)
p 538-9 The dream described here sounds like in C. S. Lewis’s  The Abolition of Man—it’s happening now! A strange new plague of microbes endowed with intelligence and will attacks almost everyone. People affected did not know how to judge and couldn’t agree what to consider evil and what good, whom to blame and whom to justify. Men killed each other in a sort of senseless spite. . . Men met in groups, agreed on something, swore to keep together, but at once began on something quite different from what they had proposed. Only a few men could be saved in the whole world.
P 541 Wasn’t everything now bound to be changed? (Because he learned to love something–Sonia)

A Man Called Ove, Without the L

A Man Called Ove, Without the L

Here is my take on A Man Called Ove from a Christian worldview, which I think is fair because many people who profess to believe in and follow Christ are reading, and enjoying, this book. I’ll get to why this is happening. Let’s start with the book, with all sorts of spoiler alerts.

I don't appreciate fiction writers who use tricks to trap the reader into some current popular ideological corner. It's all too clever, condescending, and rather bullyish. By the way, I never feel tricked or trapped by Dickens, or any great classic author. No, this is a modern literary gimmick. This book has several, as if the author writes mainly to this purpose, as if he is more conscious of the message he is pushing on the reader than writing a good story. Much of modern literature is like this. 

For example, in the first fourth of the book the author makes us shake our heads at the cranky Ove. We are hit over the head with how petty and rude he is. The author does nothing but trash the guy. Hold on. A few more pages and we get hit over the head again. Ove is only rude and inflexible because he has had a sad and difficult life. How judgmental we turn out to be! Bad us. Poor Ove. He has a right to be a jerk. Really? Ever heard of Job? Reminds me of a Toni Morrison short story I had to read in school that stealthily manipulates the reader into believing he must be a racist even when he isn’t. It was like being hit in the face with a pie. Whatever the quality of the writing, it's a lousy agenda and a lousy practical joke. On the other hand, in Dickens I learn plenty of things about myself that convict me, that need changing, but I feel the light coming from a universality about the good and bad in human nature the author expertly portrays and my own willingness to examine myself. Dickens is funny but the jokes are not on the reader.

Even fiction needs to be somewhat believable. Where is there a neighborhood on earth where uber-quirky, multiculty, politically correct, ultra-needy neighbors surround the old-fashioned, absolutist curmudgeon, never failing to enjoy his crusty insults while expecting help from him in every situation? It's much too obviously contrived in order to further those agendas, and that makes sub-par literature.

The suicidal Ove learns to put his trust in his own magnanimity, even though he never meant to help anyone and did his good deeds grudgingly; they merely fell into his lap and the memory of his wife seemed to indicate he should do them. I like the movie Hero with the anti-hero played by Dustin Hoffman better. An act of heroism falls into his lap, too, but he doesn’t get the credit and so what? He really is a bad guy and knows he doesn’t deserve it. Secular humanism, or relying on oneself and others for our worth and importance and purpose and meaning, is a sandy foundation, as we know from the scriptures. In fact, we are told we are “cursed” if we rely on man. We should know this  from living life. Okay, it’s nice to help others. We should when moved upon. But we should bear in mind that in our efforts we might actually be causing harm. Such as the nice person who anonymously cleared the snow off our driveway one snowy morning recently. They also unknowingly shredded our electrical cord plugged into our trailer. Lucky nobody got electrocuted!

Humans shouldn’t bet on themselves. If our snow-remover did it for God, relying on Christ, that’s great. But if he did it to get any kind of buzz or check off any sort of list, oops. Try as we might, we let ourselves and each other down to some degree at some point. Ove relied on Sophie, she died, and Ove let that ruin his life—because he relied on her so much. Then all he did was shift to another sandy foundation—other people. But what if he didn't have a ladder; how could have lent one? What if he wasn't strong; how could he have pulled the man off the train tracks? See? We all have limitations. That’s the hopeless part of this secular humanist worldview. It will never be enough. And it will end. As per C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce, when we get to the other side, there is no such serving others. If that’s what our god is, we won’t be interested in the Real One.

We need to know that this life is not all there is and human relationships are not the most important and mere kindness is not the highest virtue. If we claim to be religious and Christian, we are being tested for where we will spend eternity. God must come first, and truth is the highest virtue. Truth is, we’re human. We mess up. A lot. If only by way of  vanity or laziness or selfish motives. And yes, our motives matter. God sees our hearts. Nothing unclean (that is, not washed in the blood of Christ) can get to Him. Hence, truth is, we need a Divine Savior.

I had fifty pages left. At least there’s nothing gay in this insipid book, I said to myself. Maybe I can finish it. My sister chose it for our family book group after all. Maybe I’ll find something good about it in the end. I woke up the next morning before it was light, fetched the book and curled back up in bed to finish it. The first thing that met my eyes was a new character, or rather the mysterious “sooty-eyed” character we all the sudden know a little better, fully revealed in the last chapters. Gay. Who gets “married” to the obese guy next door. Really? And the icing on the cake? They adopt a child. Talk about gimmicks. Talk about an agenda. The full-on normalization of homosexuality. As Flannery O'Connor put it, "What offends my taste in fiction is when right is held up as wrong, or wrong as right."

Some  readers think this is not an important part of the story, that the gay characters are gratuitous and easily overlooked, which proves my point. The gay thing is another of those carefully placed gimmicks. Accepting homosexuality was purposely saved for last, as the final frontier for poor old traditional, conventional Ove to cross. Hence, readers are led toward the idea that now we better all do what Ove did. Oh, we can keep our harmless personality quirks, but now we have been shown that we must at least tolerate, if not celebrate, every diverse, anti-Christ, politically correct, even highly destructive whim our neighbors, friends, and family members come up with, because these people are our chief reliance.

Ove’s name happens to be Love without the capital L. That is telling. This book is a fractured fairy tale. There is no real Love in it. It's about what people get out of each other. Sure, helping others might relieve people of their grouchiness and troubles for a minute, but if done solely for that purpose  actually draws people one more step away from Real Love, Pure Selfless Love, the Love of God. And away from Christ who embodies that Love.

So why is this book so popular, especially among people who go to church every Sunday and attend temples engraved with “Holiness to the Lord” and profess to love God and follow Christ? That’s easy to answer.

People today have been brought along to think Jesus Christ is merely a good friend who would bring you chicken soup if you had a cold. This is at the least ignorant and ultimately heresy. Jesus Christ himself said he was the Son of God who came to save us from our sins. Sad to say, people would rather believe anything but the fact that they are sinners and need saving, even those who believe they are headed for heaven. Christ was hated, spied on, sought out and killed, and not because he did nice things for people. He was hated because he pricked people’s consciences and claimed to be the only remedy for the fallen nature of mankind. Representing Jesus as merely an example of rendering material, temporal services to one another is a dumbing down of the gospel to the most boring, gimmicky, contrived, godless, hopeless level, wherein we are our own judges. The service Christ offers God’s children is of a divine type, of a spiritual nature. He is our Judge, and our Divine Deliverer, our Rescuer, our Redeemer. And those who resist a sense of sin will never take advantage of the greatest, most wonderful, most interesting gift ever offered.

Sure, we serve others. Drive them to the hospital, loan them a ladder, take them a warm loaf of bread. But at least let’s be honest about it. Most of what we do for others in this time of conveniences and plenty is just fluff. These days people rarely need life-changing acts of gratuitous service, except maybe in third world countries or war zones. Admit it: we do nice little things for people at least partly to make ourselves feel good and needed and popular and important and worthwhile. To top it off, we tell the world via the internet about what we did! It is so easy to forget the first commandment, to love God and give him all the glory. It is so easy to put other gods before Him: our comforts, our deeds, our human relationships.

Want to know how to serve others best? The greatest service you can ever render is to testify of Christ as the Savior of the world, as in the sins of the world, as in our own sins, if we’ll only repent and trust in him. Sadly, only people who are desperate for forgiveness will be interested in serving or being served in this way. But He died even for those few. What a glorious Story. What a glorious Truth. What a glorious Love with a capital L.

A Man Called Ove? Chicken soup for the Godless soul.