The Meaning of Life

Where Things Come Back, by John Corey Whaley.  Atheneum, 2011, 240 pages.  Age-interest level: 16-up.

UPDATE: Where Things Come Back has won a gold medal from the American Library Association (ALA) Youth Media Awards in two categories: the Prinz award for excellence in youth literature, and the Morris Award for best novel by a first-time author of YA Fiction.  Which doesn’t necessarily mean you should read it . . .

Life stinks in Lily, Arkansas.  In fact, life pretty much stinks everywhere, or that’s how it looks to Cullen Whitter, 17, a square peg in this hole in the road where folks like to put other folks in “bubbles.”  Like the gay bubble (anybody who doesn’t like sports), or the nerd bubble (make good grades without studying), or the prep bubble (no worries, some money).  According to Dr. Webb (Cullen’s shrink, whom we never meet), “the only way of dealing with the closed-minded nature of most southern-born, conservative-leaning people is to either completely ignore their ignorance or to perpetrate it by playing into the set of standards they subconsciously hold for a particular bubble.”  In other words, stop whining, nerd—it will just make more “southern-born, conservative-learning people” call you a nerd.  Dr. Webb obviously constructs his own bubbles, of which he is unaware.

Anyway, the inhabitants of Lily are all agog because a biologist from Oregon has spotted the Lazarus woodpecker, thought to be extinct, in the vicinity.  Their town is finally on the map!  The Lazarus burger and woodpecker (hair)cut and inevitable woodpecker festival soon follow, and in the excitement Cullen’s totally lovable brother Gabriel, 14, disappears and is eventually assumed dead.  This is the central story, interspersed with the seemingly unrelated tale of Benton Sage, a failed Baptist missionary, and his college roommate Cabot Searcy, a likeable chap with the unlikely goal of changing the world sometime, some way.  Cabot catches like a fever Benton’s obsession with the apocryphal Book of Enoch, which, with its theology of fallen angels, appears to be the master key to world-changing.

The Cullen Whitter story and the Benton/Cabot stories do converge after a lot of Lily, Arkansas, aimlessness and absurdity.  Does Gabriel come back, like Lazarus, from death?  Maybe.  But since Cullen has been having lots of visions in which people turn into zombies, there may not be that much difference between death and life.  Or it’s a Schrodinger’s-cat situation: Gabriel’s life/death, Cabot’s truth/myth, the Lazarus woodpecker’s sighting/non-sighting, all depend on the observer.  Kind of like the greatest question of all: “When I asked him about the meaning of life, Dr. Webb got very quiet and then told me that life has no one meaning, it only has whatever meaning each of us puts on our own life.”

John Corey Whaley was inspired to write this novel by an NPR report on supposed sightings of the rare-and-possibly-extinct  ivory-billed woodpecker (sometimes colloquially referred to as the Lord God woodpecker because that’s the most common exclamation upon seeing one).  As an examination of the human condition, it’s interesting.  As an examination of life’s meaning, it falls short due to its religious ambivalence.  Whaley seems to share the current perception that the more specific a belief system, the more oppressive: Benton sets out to be a model Christian but becomes Christianity’s victim.  Gabriel, a much more sympathetic character, is intensely religious, but not evangelistic.  Odd, though–the religion that oppresses is the very one that supplies most of the story’s imagery and symbolism.  Christianity hands the author the very implements he uses to beat it with.

The author is correct that belief (or lack of it) propels our decisions, our passions, our priorities, our goals, for better or worse.  But faith does not dictate the bare fact that we are alive, much less what happens to us after we die.  If nothing happens, then it doesn’t matter what we believe, as Paul implies in I Cor. 15:32.   But humanity can’t seem to shake the conviction that death is not the end: “He has also placed eternity in our hearts” (Eccl. 3:11).  We stake our lives, knowingly or not, on our idea of what follows when the heart stops and the brainwave goes flat: in other words, when we have no more control.  “It never hurts anybody to think that life gives you second chances,” says Cullen’s mother, expressing the misty hope of most Americans.  But it could hurt, for an eternity.  Why are so many willing to take a chance on “whatever”?

The vast majority of teenagers are a long way from the grave, but they should be thinking about what truth is and why it matters.   While I can’t wholeheartedly recommend Where Things Come Back, because of some bad language and some illicit (though not graphic) sex, it could, for some young people, be a springboard to conversation.  The conversation about the meaning of life is one we need to have with our kids, not once, but over and over.

For other fictional treatments of–and misunderstandings of–Christianity, see reviews of Revolver and The Dark Divine.  Also Emily’s series on Christ in Literature, beginning here.