Mediaculture

First, The Shack is a phenomenon. This novel, published by a small publisher, Windblown Media, now has more than 2 million copies in print. The author, William P. Young, gets nearly 100 emails per day from readers inspired by its story.
Second, the book has critics who dislike its theology, which includes a form of universalism.

Third, as fiction, it is terribly written.

The novel’s narrative derives in part from Young’s own experience. According to a USA Today interview, he was born in Canada to missionaries who brought him as an infant to New Guinea to live with the primitive Dani tribe. He says he was subject to the harsh verbal attacks of his unhappy father and sexual assaults by tribesmen. He went to a missionary boarding school at age 6, he says, and was molested by older students.

When he was 25, his 18-year-old brother died in a work accident, the mother of Kim, his wife, died unexpectedly, and his niece, 5 years and one day old, was run over by a cement truck while riding her new birthday bicycle. Thirteen years later, after committing adultery, he spent a year in counseling, years more soul-searching, marveling at Kim’s steadfast commitment, before he reached wholeness in faith, he says. She prompted him to deal with his pain, and he wrote The Shack in 2005.

The novel tells the story of Mack, whose young daughter Missy is abducted and murdered by a serial killer in a shack in the woods of Oregon. Years later, Mack, still devastated, receives a note inviting him back to the shack. It’s signed “Papa,” the name his more resilient and spiritual wife, Nan, uses for God.

He goes to the shack and meets Papa, “a large black woman,” Sarayu, “a small, distinctively Asian woman,” and Jesus, who “appeared Middle Eastern and was dressed like a laborer.”

Despite the seemingly audacious step of using such anthropomorphisms for the Trinity (misleading though they be, since only the Son was incarnated), the descriptions are simple and clichéd, what is called lazy writing.

These three characters, plus a woman named Wisdom, who makes an appearance later, spend the weekend teaching Mack about the nature of God and the meaning of his daughter’s death. Much of the book consists of this relentless preaching, which you might expect at church but is a death knell to good fiction.

In fact, this book breaks many of the rules for fiction writing. Some examples:
• It begins with a description of the weather.
• It uses generalities, e.g., “Everyone understands and shares in this singular justification.”
• It uses unnecessary dialogue.
• It gives characters colloquial speech without cause (“Do ya need me to have him call ya?”)
• It uses unnecessary explanation.

That’s just in the first 30 pages. Then I quit keeping track.

OK, I’m sensitive, since I love good fiction. What about the book’s teaching? It basically teaches that God is full of grace and doesn’t reject anyone. Such teaching is defensible and useful. At the same time, God apparently has no use for religious institutions. There is no communal or political element to the book’s teaching, no church.

The Shack is popular, I imagine, because it uses story to speak to heartfelt issues, including why God allows suffering. But there are so many better-told stories out there, including those in the Bible. And the Bible includes nuance and mystery and is much better written. Yet many people seem to prefer this kind of book.