The Five People You Meet In Heaven

After the emotional weight of Elie Wiesel's Night, I needed some literary bubblegum to take my mind off concentration camp horrors. But, I had a lot of work to do around the house this week and a book on tape would help the drudgery of cleaning and painting, so I went to the stacks to see what my library had to offer. I have grown to love audiobooks and any other storytelling (Prairie Home Companion, This American Life, etc.). I own a few, and I take them out whenever listening to the radio gets to be too depressing. With all the talk of unemployment, a tanking economy, rising healthcare costs and the usual political/media/religious discord, cranking and subsequent "analysis" ad nauseum, the radio is hardly an escape anymore. All the more reason to get a feel-good story.

I have never read The Five People You Meet In Heaven or Mitch Albom's other bestseller, Tuesdays with Morrie, but I knew his novels were popular, beach-reading books that would probably make good movies on the Lifetime Network. It was available and I started listening to it as soon as I got home. TFPYMIH reminds me of A Christmas Carol, except the main character actually died. Here's a bit of the story to explain the comparison: Eddie is a Korean War vet who is the head of maintenance for a fictional Coney Island-type amusement park. A ride malfunctioned and he died trying to save a little girl who was in the path of a falling capsule. He wakes up in heaven and he visits five people who help explain the mysteries of his life. He doesn't meet the people you would assume he would: his mother, best friend, or other beloved family members who have preceeded him in death. Instead, his first visitor is a man who was part of the freak show of the amusement park when he was a young boy. Since Eddie's father was the head of park maintenance before him, Eddie spent a lot of time at the park. This man was in the freak show because his skin was blue, a result of shoddy doctoring to treat a nervous condition when he was a kid. Eddie barely remembered him. Blue Man didn't play a significant role in Eddie's life, and he was nothing more than a long-forgotten figure from his childhood. As it turns out, Blue Man was in heaven waiting for Eddie because Eddie had chased a stray baseball out into the street and he was almost hit by a car driven by Blue Man, though Eddie didn't know it at the time. Blue Man was traumatized by the near miss and he proceeded to pull the car into an alley, suffer a heart attack and die, all a result of his lingering nervousness. Blue Man was not bitter; the story was meant to illustrate the point that life isn't always fair, and from our earthly perspective, there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. After revealing his story, his skin was restored to a human shade of beige, and he was whisked away to the upper floors of heaven.

Eddie visits four more people who shed additional light on his life, each progressively more intimate and profound. In this way, it resembles Dickens because it is a morality play that encourages the main character to reexamine his life with a little otherworldly help. Eddie is an everyman; any reader (or listener) can find something kindred in his personality: As a war vet, his body has been a dilapidated, painful shell for years; he lost the love of his life; he had a lousy relationship with his dad; he likes children; he felt like he abandoned his dreams when the weight of adulthood got to be too much; and he believed he was a nobody, one who wasted the life he had been given. Something in his character resonates with anyone who reads the story.

Maybe it's the medium, but I was bawling like a baby at the end of the story. Albom knows just how to tug at your heartstrings, but I think it was exaggerated by the narrator's voice and the overwraught background music. The narrator, Erik Singer, did an admirable job impersonating women and Eastern Europeans. The overarching theme was a plea for empathy and the ability to look at every situation from different points of view. Our lives are too interrelated not to. TFPYMIH isn't Shakespeare, but it is a Hallmark-style diversion from the monotony of everyday life that gives us enough of the warm-and-fuzzies to deal with the real world again.