Category Archives: Books

Where are the wild things?

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The first I heard that Spike Jonze was making a movie of Where the Wild Things Are was when David Kavanaugh (whose work I’ve posted on a bit here) raved to me about how great the trailer was, calling it the best thing he’d seen on film all year. It was a pretty good piece of work, though I didn’t think it quite merited the praise he gave it, but it didn’t do what a trailer is supposed to do: make me want to see the movie. Rather the opposite, actually, as it gave me significant misgivings about what Jonze, Dave Eggers et al. were doing with the book; it really didn’t look like a movie I wanted to see.

From the reviews and early reactions, it appears to me that—to steal a line from my brother-in-law (on the Lord of the Rings movies)—the movie is almost but not quite completely unlike Sendak, even if Maurice Sendak himself disagrees. Indeed, it sounds like the movie falls short in ways I didn’t even see coming; I would hardly have thought to find a reviewer writing,

Where the Wild Things Are ultimately is not wild enough. Despite their extraordinary costumes, these ordinary characters fail to transform Max’s journey into something approaching magic.

To be sure, as io9’s reviewer notes, “Spike Jonze is known for making uncomfortable films”; that was part of the reason for my misgivings (on an abstract level, I admire Being John Malkovich and Adaptation as conceptual exercises, but I can’t say I enjoyed either of them or have any desire whatsoever to rewatch them), but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Some might think that a movie based on a children’s book ought to be a comfortable film, but I’m not among them, especially when it comes to this particular book. That same reviewer writes,

Wild Things is not a movie about a little boy who wants to be wild, traveling (in his fantasy, or via magic) to a strange land full of monsters who make him their king and let him be as wild as he wants, until he gets homesick. Rather, Wild Things is a movie about the terrors and insecurities of childhood, and the monsters we all have inside of us. It presents an unnerving portrait of childhood as a stormy, exhilarating time, in which play is intensely serious and important, and loneliness is the biggest nightmare of them all.

Insofar as that’s true, that’s a good thing, because that’s very much in line with what the book is about. The problem seems to be, though, that Jonze made a movie that’s adult in all the wrong ways; the io9 review perhaps has the best statement of the common complaint:

At times during the main body of the story, I felt like I was sitting on a particularly long therapy session in a group home, or a Seinfeld episode with fewer jokes.

What seems to be missing is an actual childlike perspective. I was struck by Russell Moore’s post on the movie, and particularly his analysis of why so many children love the book:

Children, it turns out, aren’t as naive about evil as we assume they are. Children of every culture, and in every place, seem to have a built-in craving for monsters and dragons and “wild things.” The Maurice Sendak book appeals to kids because it tells them something about what they intuitively know is true. The world around them is scary. There’s a wildness out there. The Sendak book shows the terror of a little boy who is frightened by his own lack of self-control, and who conquers it through self-control, by becoming king of all the wild things.

The problem, I think, is that too many adults “grow out” of that awareness of the wildness of the world—perhaps it fades as the common illusion of control, over our own lives and over the world around us, grows. Only adults can wax philosophical about how evil is an illusion and people are really basically good; children aren’t yet capable of that sort of folly. Perhaps that’s why Jonze seems to have take a children’s book and turned it into a movie about adult issues and problems.

Reading a book second-hand

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Now, there’s really no such thing as second-hand reading; it’s not like second-hand smoke, where you get to breathe the smoke that escaped someone else’s lungs. But there are times when someone else is so involved in a book that you get some of the effect—they keep reading you sentences or paragraphs, it keeps coming up in their conversation, and the book seems to be everywhere present.

Such has been my experience with my lovely wife and N. D. Wilson’s book Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God’s Spoken World. She chose it to review as part of Thomas Nelson’s “Book Review Bloggers” program, and her capsule review is now up—I think she gives it 6.5 stars out of 5—but I think I can safely say that that won’t be the last thing she writes about it. Nor, I feel equally safe in saying, will this be the last thing I write about it. It’s an amazing book in what’s been a pretty good year so far for amazing books, full of godly wonder . . . which is a glorious thing.

“That limitless horizon”

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Last week, I posted the video of Neil Gaiman reading his wonderful poem “Instructions,” noting inter alia that the poem will before long become a picture book (an event I await with happy anticipation). Last night, I linked to Eric Ortlund’s blog to cite his excellent post on the necessity of grace, and the fatal thing that is moral exhortation apart from the gospel message. As such, I cannot fail to note the linkage of the two: Dr. Ortlund has also posted Gaiman’s video, and along with it some comments on Gaiman which, quite frankly, say it better than I ever have.

Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite authors because . . . well, aside from his knowledge of ancient religion, reading him feels like I’m dreaming. There is a surfeit of meaning in his books; he’s able to evoke that limitless horizon against which we all live, and the deep, deep ocean (miles deep, dark, impenetrable) over which we walk. He makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck, although I can never quite say why. Something opens in the back of my mind, and something big starts to hum back there. Don’t know how else to say it.

Beautifully put.

(Follow the link for some of Dr. Ortlund’s recommendations; and bear in mind that Gaiman has a very broad range. If you like urban fantasy, read Neverwhere; if you love fairytales, it’s hard to beat Stardust; the sequel to American Gods, Anansi Boys, is also excellent; and of course his latest, The Graveyard Book, won a well-deserved Newbery.)

Your Jesus is too safe

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It’s a great pleasure to participate in the blog tour for Jared Wilson’s book Your Jesus Is Too Safe: Outgrowing a Drive-Thru, Feel-Good Savior—though I must confess that the term “blog tour” gives me an image of a truly strange-looking trolley rolling along the infobahn, dinging merrily away, with a disembodied voice gravely intoning, “Next stop . . .” None of which, of course, has anything to do with the book.

Full disclosure: I’ve known Jared Wilson as a blogger and blog correspondent (for lack of a better term) for a couple years now, I had the privilege of meeting him in person and spending a little time with him at GCNC this past April, and I consider him a friend. I like and respect him a great deal.

Truth behind full disclosure: none of that affects my review of his book. If anything, it’s the other way around—this book captures much of the reason why I like and respect Jared. When Ed Stetzer begins the foreword by declaring, “The pages you are about to read are an antidote,” he’s right; and it’s an antidote that far too much of the American church badly needs.

An antidote to what? To the legalistic no-gospel that fills so much of the American church—conservative as well as liberal; some of the worst offenders consider themselves “evangelical”—and our convenient, comfortable, sanitized, commoditized caricatures of Jesus, all precisely designed to meet our felt needs. As Jared says, our culture is plenty familiar with Postcard Jesus, Get-Out-of-Hell-Free Jesus, Hippie Jesus, Buddy Jesus, ATM Jesus, Role Model Jesus, and Therapeutic Jesus, and many Christians are thrilled when some famous person or other gives thanks to Grammy Award Speech Jesus; but the real Jesus, the Jesus we find in Scripture, is an altogether unfamiliar figure, because all too many churches aren’t preaching him. After all, he makes us uncomfortable, and he makes the world uncomfortable, and that’s no way to grow a church, now, is it?

To this kind of thinking, Jared offers his book as an antidote, driven by the love of Christ and the provocation of the Spirit of God. As he writes (239-40),

The passion of my life is the scandalous gospel of God’s amazing grace in Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit cultivated this passion in me through the Scriptures, in which I see Jesus chastised and criticized for proclaiming the gospel by eating with sinners and giving himself to sinners. My encouragement to you—my call to you—is to partake of that gospel, to acknowledge and confess and believe that you are a sinner in need of God’s grace, and that Jesus Christ died and rose to manifest that grace to you, and that you can’t live without Jesus. You cannot do it.

That is the sort of thing that ought to be the lifeblood of every Christian and the heartbeat of every church . . . and it isn’t. It isn’t because we don’t take our sin seriously enough, and we don’t take Jesus seriously enough. The purpose of this book is to change that, for those who have ears to hear.

To do this, Jared presents what he calls twelve portraits of Jesus, looking at Christ from twelve different angles, through a dozen different lenses. He considers:

  • Jesus the Promise
  • Jesus the Prophet
  • Jesus the Forgiver
  • Jesus the Man
  • Jesus the Shepherd
  • Jesus the Judge
  • Jesus the Redeemer
  • Jesus the King
  • Jesus the Sacrifice
  • Jesus the Provision
  • Jesus the Lord
  • Jesus the Savior

Some of these sound familiar to American ears, while others are quite strange (I can imagine readers asking “Jesus the Provision? What does he mean by that?”); but the truth is that even the familiar ones have been trimmed and tamed, made safe and non-threatening and altogether nice, in the teaching of far too much of the church in this culture. Not to put too fine a point on it, far too many of us in this country aren’t Christians at all but idolators, worshiping a Jesus of our own invention who is nicely tuned to tell us just what we want to hear. In response, Jared sets out to open our eyes to what it really means that Jesus was a fully human adult male, or that he is the King of Kings. In so doing, he will no doubt make a lot of folks very, very uncomfortable—but it’s a holy discomfort, the evidence of the Spirit of God at work.

In painting his portraits of Jesus, Jared draws heavily on Scripture, as he should; this is a book filled with biblical quotations, and not just single verses, but whole passages. Of course, there are plenty of books out there which quote a lot of Scripture and then proceed to misuse it, but that isn’t a problem here; one of the chief qualities of the book is its careful attention to what Scripture is actually saying, and its author’s clear determination to follow wherever the word of God leads and let the chips fall where they may. Rather than using the Bible to make his points, he has sought to place himself under the Bible and its authority, and thus to say only what it says.

This is not to say, however, that he has produced a book which is disconnected from life as we know it; quite the contrary. The academic foundation is clearly there, but this is no theoretical discussion; it is, rather, a profoundly practical book—or perhaps we might say, following G. K. Chesterton, that it is a profoundly unpractical book in all the right ways. Chesterton has one of his characters, the poet and painter Gabriel Gale, offer to help a man who has attempted suicide, explaining his offer with these words:

I am no good at practical things, and you have got beyond practical things.

What you want is an unpractical man. . . . What can practical men do here? Waste their practical time in running after the poor fellow and cutting him down from one pub sign after another? Waste their practical lives watching him day and night, to see that he doesn’t get hold of a rope or a razor? Do you call that practical? You can only forbid him to die. Can you persuade him to live? Believe me, that is where we come in. A man must have his head in the clouds and his wits wool-gathering in fairyland, before he can do anything so practical as that.

Chesterton was right: the practical counsels of this world can only forbid people to die (or, more ominously, order them to die); they cannot persuade people to live, much less tell them how. That is for unpractical people, for those who have given their lives over to the unpractical mendicant teacher from Nazareth, and in so doing have learned how to live; and to illustrate that, Jared offers a number of stories of just what that unpractical life looks like. Some, like the story of the Amish of Quarryville, PA who forgave the man who murdered their daughters, are widely known; others, like the story of his cousins Steve and LaVonne Jones and their son Colton (which, as a father of three, wrenched at my heart), are not. All bear witness to the truth that it’s only in the real Jesus Christ, not any of the more “practical” or “useful” versions of him that we invent, that we find real life.

The tone of this book is informal and conversational, at times snarky and sarcastic (though the bulk of that is to be found among its copious and entertaining footnotes), and occasionally slangy; some, at least of older generations, may find that off-putting at points. In general, however, I don’t think any but the most formal of readers will find it a true problem, while younger folks in particular will likely find the tone attractive and appealing. Taken as a whole, I believe the conversational tone is a benefit to the book, for a couple reasons.

One, it suits the author; I don’t have any way of knowing if attempting to write in a more formal style would have made him sound stuffy and pedantic, but writing in this vein makes it clear that he is anything but. That’s disarming, which is a good thing; given that he’s calling his readers to set aside our comfortable Jesuses for one who will challenge us and make us very uncomfortable with ourselves, the natural response from many will be to look for a reason to reject that call. Many will no doubt find reasons, but branding Jared as stuffy and out of touch won’t be one of them.

Two, the book’s tone serves to reinforce the point that its message is for all of us, and all of life. Following Christ isn’t just about doing formal things for an hour or so on Sunday morning, but it’s about how we’re supposed to live all the rest of the time, too; it has to do with cracks about old teen movies and popular fiction just as much as with the sorts of things we think of as “spiritual.”

The great risk Jared took with this book—one which he himself acknowledges—is that in looking at Jesus from twelve different perspectives, he might have “inadvertently propose[d] twelve different Jesuses, creating intellectual confusion where the purpose has been to enhance clarity.” I think, though, that he has avoided that quite successfully by tracing one strong theme through all twelve chapters: “the great unifying presence of the gospel.” This is the hub of which the twelve perspectives are spokes, as he lays out in the conclusion of the twelfth chapter (280):

The good news is that Jesus Christ is not just God with us, but he’s also God forus. For us, he is the promise of fulfillment, the prophet of truth, the forgiver of sins, the man of sorrows, the good shepherd, the righteous judge, the redeemer, the reigning king, the atoning sacrifice, the all-sufficient provision, the almighty God, and the rescuer of the lost. He is all these things and more, but none of this is good news if he is not also the Lord and the Savior of sinners in need of grace.

Today is the day of salvation. The kingdom is at hand. Repent and believe.

If you will confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Jared Wilson has written a book that is full of the gospel of Jesus Christ, that shines the light of that gospel from every page, and that I believe will call many in this country to that gospel for the first time. It is a book for the reconversion of the church, and for the conversion of many who are outside the church because they’ve rejected our false Jesuses, not knowing that the real Jesus is someone altogether different. It’s a book we need to read, not because Jared is wonderful, but because Jesus is wonderful, and Jared is talking about Jesus. It is, in short, a book for which we can honestly say, “Thank you, God.”

Good books help rough days

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Down with a gut bug today; have I mentioned I have a wonderful wife?  She swung by the library while she was out and about at one point and brought back a whole pile of books, including the first three of Jim Butcher‘s Harry Dresden novels, which a good friend of ours had strongly recommended a while back; I finished the first one, Storm Front, today, and am about 2/3 of the way through the second one, Fool Moon, and have enjoyed both a great deal.  For those not familiar with the series, think classic hardboiled detective fiction in contemporary Chicago but with the addition of magic and magical creatures such as vampires and werewolves; the protagonist, Harry Dresden, is a wizard and a detective.

The books tend toward the bleaker side of fantasy (not surprising, since the big blurb on Storm Front comes from the redoubtably dark Glen Cook), but not without hope, and Butcher does some things very well as a writer.  I wouldn’t call him a great stylist, but he has a core of interesting characters, writes some very nice scenes, and so far at least, is telling good stories of their kind; the books feel real.  Not much is original, but he’s given the standards his own twist, which counts for a fair bit.  For urban fantasy, it’s not a match for Neverwhere, but it’s an enjoyable read, and it has this advantage:  there’s a lot more of it.  It’s certainly brightened my day.

The hunt for Gollum

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My thanks to Bill Roberts for posting this—it’s the trailer for a fan-made movie about Aragorn’s search for Gollum, a chapter in the story of The Lord of the Rings which isn’t told, only recounted briefly by Aragorn.  It is, obviously, a low-budget production, but from the trailer, it seems to be an impressive piece of work nevertheless.

A few tips of the hat

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We’re having some internet problems here—no connection at the church today at all, and a pretty poor one here at home—so I haven’t had much success with any online work; but I thought I might be able to get a relatively quick links post through.

Jared Wilson has a couple strong posts up, “The Kingdom is For Those Who Know How to Die” and “Faith, Hope, and Love is About Proximity to Jesus.” I’ve also been meaning to note his excerpt from Skye Jethani’s new book The Divine Commodity, which I think dovetails with my recent post on worship.

Not to leave the rest of the Thinklings out, Philip has a good post on communicating the gospel, Bird makes a good point about repentance, and Bill asks an interesting question:  is the American church actually too macho?

I love Hap’s retelling of the story of Abigail.  If you’re not familiar with it, you can find the original in 1 Samuel 25.

Pauline Evans, to whom I haven’t linked in far too long, has a nifty little post up on the development of computers, and how the comparisons we use are in some ways quite misleading; she also has one up, I just discovered, on a couple children’s fantasy books that I think I’m going to need to read.  (This may follow nicely on our recent discovery in this household of Tamora Pierce.)

Debbie Berkley posted something last January that I’ve kept meaning to write about, reflecting on the uncertainty we face these days in the light of the wisdom of a fellow Christian from India:  “Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.”  Sage counsel, and certainly no less applicable now, two months on.

And, on the subject of politics (and specifically political dirty tricks), Andrew Breitbart has had some interesting things to say of late about the online war liberals are waging (and winning) against conservatives.  Barack Obama promised to elevate the tone of political discourse in this country, but you don’t have to be a Sarah Palin supporter to recognize that some of his followers didn’t get the memo.

This isn’t everyone I’d like to mention, but I’m only linking to pages I can actually pull up, and it’s pretty hit-and-miss at the moment.  Still, I’m glad to note these, and maybe I’ll do another one soon to highlight the ones that wouldn’t come up.

An object lesson in humility

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A while back, linking to one of John Stackhouse’s posts, I wrote the following:

it’s not the belief in absolute truth as such that produces dogmatism, but the combination of a belief in absolute truth with a belief that the self is absolute; and it’s to defend that belief in the absolute self that people declare the truth to be relative. For my own part, I believe that the truth is absolute, and I am relative; my certainty is necessarily limited, not by the absence of absolutes, but by my own limited ability to perceive and apprehend them accurately. . . . We should believe what we believe firmly and with conviction; but also with humility. After all, the fact that we believe something doesn’t guarantee that it’s true; as Dr. Stackhouse says, it’s about confidence in God who is truth, not about certainty in ourselves, who aren’t.

That was something I’d been kicking around for a while, which I was foolish enough to think I’d come up with on my own.  Turns out the only reason I thought that was because it had been too long since I read Chesterton.  Here’s the root and spring of that idea, from Orthodoxy (only much better put, as you would expect), courtesy of Ray Ortlund—and along with it, the reminder of the importance of humility:

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself.

The narrow mind of the literary world

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As my lovely wife posted recently, the British novelist Julian Gough wrote an excellent blog post a while back on the self-deluded ghetto that is modern literary fiction.  His post was occasioned by a review in the Guardian—a review of a lit-fic book by a British author, by a British lit-fic author—that was very impressed with the book in question for the originality of its central theme.  The only problem?  Well, here’s what Gough has to say:

This is the first line of the review: “The Opposite House is not the first novel to suggest that migration is a condition, not an event; but it may be the first to contend that the condition afflicts no one so profoundly as the gods.”Now, I couldn’t quite believe that was her opening claim. But it was.  She really thought that her stablemate at Bloomsbury was probably “the first to contend” that migration “afflicts no one so profoundly as the gods”. And editors and sub-editors had let this stand.Which means that nobody involved in the whole process was aware that Neil Gaiman had spent nearly six hundred pages, in his novel American Gods (which is not “literary”, nor published by Bloomsbury), writing about nothing but how migration profoundly afflicts the gods.

I’m not surprised by this—nor, I suspect, is Gough, since in the first paragraph of the piece, he’s already diagnosed the main problem with the modern literary ghetto:  it’s

a ghetto that doesn’t know it’s a ghetto: a ghetto that thinks it is the world.

I have no problem with people enjoying literary fiction; I think a lot of it’s badly overpraised, but some of it’s worthwhile.  What I do have a problem with, as I’ve noted before, is precisely this attitude Gough puts his finger on, that lit-fic isn’t a genre, but rather is simply what’s worth the attention of the serious reader.  This is, not to put too fine a point on it, pure tripe from beginning to end, as B. R. Myers demonstrated at some length a while ago in The Atlantic (much to the anger and discomfiture, it should be noted, of the the mandarins of the lit-fic world; but though they did a fine job of dismissing his points and pulling rank on him, I don’t recall anyone actually disproving his arguments).  Between them, Myers and Gough do a fine job of blowing away the pretentions of modern literary fiction and its acolytes, and showing that their affectation of superiority to the rest of the publishing world has no grounding in reality; in so doing, they demonstrate that the self-proclaimed openness and wideness of vision of the lit-fic world is in fact astonishingly myopic and narrow-minded.