BOOK REVIEW:
Mitch Albom
"The Five People You Meet in Heaven"
(Hyperion)
Entertainment
Art
By RYAN RADEMACHER
"This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time."
And thus begins Albom’s newest novella The Five People You Meet in Heaven. A book which will touch your heart, just as his first novella Tuesdays with Morrie already did. The Five People You Meet in Heaven is the story of Eddie, an 83-year-old war veteran who has become disillusioned with his nothing special of a life.
The story opens, unbeknownst to Eddie, minutes before his death at his job at Ruby Pier where he, like his distant and unloving father, has worked since he was a young man. Eddie dies trying to save a little girl from a ride that is about to crush her. The last thing Eddie feels on Earth is two little hands and then "A stunning impact. A blinding flash of light. And then, nothing."
The story continues, and in Heaven, Eddie proceeds to meet five people from his life. In the story, Heaven is a place where Eddie’s life is explained by five people who shaped his, and like any good dialectic relationship, Eddie has also shaped the lives of the five people he meets. Patrick O’Kelley of Amazon.com calls The Five People You Meet in Heaven, "part melodrama and part parable." Albom’s novella is reminiscent of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. There is a story to be told and a lesson to be learned.
For Eddie, Heaven not only has five people he will meet, but also has five lessons to be learned, one from each person; a euphemism to help clarify questions Eddie has had about his seemingly meaningless life.
Albom does an excellent job of connecting Eddie’s fictional life to the reader’s actual life. We can identify with Eddie because we can all see a bit of him in us. What person has not felt like their life is meaningless? What person has not felt like a part of the backdrop? Publishers Weekly calls Eddie "the kind of guy everybody…tended to write off as one of life’s minor characters, a gruff bit of background color." And this connection the reader can establish with Eddie helps draw the reader into Albom’s newest masterpiece.
Albom makes heavy use of religion, but there are no references to any certain religion. In fact, Albom introduces the first page of the novella with this inscription: "Everyone has an idea of heaven, as do most religions, and they should all be respected. The version represented here is only a guess, a wish, in some ways, that my uncle, and others like him- - people who felt unimportant here on earth - realize, finally, how much they mattered and how they were loved." The Five People You Meet in Heaven, like Tuesdays with Morrie, is a tearjerker. There are moments of Eddie’s journey that touch the heart, and can help you reflect on your life. Oakley of Amazon.com is correct is his comment that "Albom takes a big risk with the novel; such a story can easily veer into the saccharine and preachy, and this one does in moments, [but] even with its flaws, The Five People You Meet in Heaven is a small, pure, and simple book that will find good company on the a shelf next to It’s A Wonderful Life."
In this day and age of the faster and cheaper, the better, who doesn’t have time to sit back and read a feel-joy book? Albom’s prose is simple and effective. Just as Eddie puts together the pieces of his existence, we can begin to form questions to help us find the meaning of lives. Even the fact that we are asking ourselves these questions proves that Albom has produced yet another masterpiece that helps us see the beauty and meaning of the ordinary.
