The Shack

“Have you read The Shack?” I know I’ve been asked that on a half a dozen occasions over the last year.

While waiting for reference to arrive for their shift I browsed the rolling shelf, skimming the titles and noticed The Shack was in without a reserve. I picked it up read till about page six.

Donna never doesn’t jump a bit at the sight of my face, she hasn’t grown used to it, Maura Tierney’s face at her desk. I smile and she purses her face at no one but herself these days for still looking at me and seeing a television screen instead, a face that doesn’t belong in her physical reality yet

“I think I’m going to have to start paying for parking,” she says.

I’ve never gotten how a walk in that part of downtown Charleston can be anything other than baseline enjoyable. That’d just be one more thing to add to my very long and large: I don’t get it list. It’s ever expanding

That night I tucked myself into bed with The Shack , reading past the prologue I found myself in the Gorge. Bothered, I laid my index finger between the pages,She was fifteen minutes late for her shift “I’ve been driving around for almost an hour looking for a spot”.

“Parking’s free at the Battery,” I volunteer.

“But then I’d have to walk and that would be exercise,”

“Yeah,” I said smiling and not at all catching her meaning “free parking and a walk”

What seemed a double positive to me was and is not to her. Different strokes, she’d have to alter her shoe choices, throw off the outfit and “I hate exercise”. a human book mark.

There’d been something familiar about the prologue. I’d read this sort of thing before. Something to do with San Francisco- yes that farcical offering from Tan, which was more than appropriate given the piece. I wondered if Young had applied the same technique but I hoped not because from what I’d read on the jacket, to me you don’t play with an audience about death and God. Unless of course you’re writing comedy.

Flipping to the back of the book, there was and is a rather thick section for fiction where type changes, no footnotes but paragraph after paragraph in smaller print like an adendum to contract or a child not so confident in themselves, trying to disappear a bit.

I read what the reader is intended to read once they’ve read it all and suspended their disbelief, only to find their disbelief founded. I wonder where it started, this trend? Introducing a character as the life force behind the tale, borrowing the dead or shy as the trustworthy writer arrives on scene and tells you what this otherwise extraordinary individual can‘t or couldn‘t. The author is not the author merely assisting and reporting, with perhaps some artistic license, but delivering true story -except not.

The reader in a way becomes a character as well, a dupe too, assuming a part and playing a roll in the fiction themselves by converting fiction to non-fiction, playing pretend with the author. I don’t understand the practice really, truth is so much stranger, richer and unlikely that any fiction writer could or can ever conceive.

So into the shack, Kate’s obvious aftereffect of wondering what if the she hadn’t tipped the boat, certainly the antisocial explanation. Into the shack where Nan and Mack are stronger for it and I wonder if Young interviewed couples who had suffered, endured and kept going and keep going everyday, every birthday, every marking point that their child is gone. I hope he interviewed them; there are lots of them, too many and I hope he heard their stories, asked the questions and was surprised and informed before usurped their stories. I hope their losses weren't treated as mere props like a chair or a lamp.