Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Wages of Popularity

Stuart Mitchner

One afternoon in the late 1970s, a small man who was pushing 80 at the time sat down with some Princeton students in a room at 185 Nassau Street to talk about making movies. Considering the fact that he was Frank Capra, the Academy-Award-winning legend who had directed the great stars of Hollywood's golden age, he was remarkably defensive about his work. One of the students had asked a question he particularly resented because it made a distinction between so-called art films and popular, commercial movies like his own It's a Wonderful Life and It Happened One Night, among other Hollywood classics. The gist of his defense of popularity was that sooner or later the quality of the work in any medium could be measured by the quantity of public appreciation. Critics. scholars, and reviewers be damned, in other words. The people will have the last say. "All great art is popular!" he insisted, citing Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and DaVinci. "Look at all the people who come to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa!" The students were a bit rattled. Why was the old guy so touchy? One reason was that he thought the commercially successful, populist, upbeat nature of his films had devalued his work in the eyes of film critics and scholars. As if art couldn't be art if it was popular. The same problem has plagued best-selling authors who claim that their popularity has compromised their artistic credibility.

Frank Capra's words came to mind again when I was reading Mitch Albom's novel, The Five People You Meet in Heaven (Hyperion $19.95). What made me think of reviewing Albom's book was the extent of its popularity. Five People has been on the Times Book Review's list of fiction best-sellers for 81 weeks. Albom's previous book, Tuesdays with Morrie, stayed on the non-fiction list even longer. Regulars like Mary Higgins Clark (No. 1 this week), James Patterson (No. 7) and John Grisham (No. 8) are merely seasonal visitors by comparison. The perennial best-seller is generally a "good read" and good reads come and go. Both Albom's books offer something more than a good read, much as Frank Capra's best movies offer something more inspired than the standard Hollywood product. Without taking an admittedly unfair comparison too far, not to mention stating the obvious, there is more cinematic art in Capra's movies than there is literary art in Albom's fiction. When praising Capra's "complete mastery of his medium," Graham Greene observed that Capra's "screen always seems twice as big as other people's" and that he "cuts as brilliantly as Eisenstein." He also stressed a quality Capra shares with Albom: "a kinship with his audience, a sense of common life, a morality: He believes in the possibility of happiness; he believes ... in human nature." The readers who buy and love The Five People You Meet in Heaven believe, or want to believe, in heaven, or as the novel's opening paragraph puts it, that "all endings are beginnings."

Some people I've spoken with made faces at the mere mention of Mitch Albom's novel. They were responding to a problematic mixture: enormous popularity combined with what they obviously think of as dumbed down spirituality. When high-brow film authorities make faces at the mention of Frank Capra (though they usually admit that he's a gifted director), they are responding to a similar combination, only in Capra's case instead of lowbrow spirituality you get sentimental populism that sometimes verges on a sort of Norman Rockwell fascism. While there is little doubt Frank Capra will always be counted among major American directors, it's safe to say Mitch Albom is unlikely ever to be considered a major American writer. His books have outlasted the "good reads" not so much because they are inspired, but because they are inspirational. Books that manage to offer entertainingly soul-satisfying remedies are likely to have a longer life and a more devoted readership than conventional escapist best-sellers. The Five People You Meet in Heaven will never become an American Christmas Carol, as has happened with Capra's 1946 film, It's a Wonderful Life, thanks to Christmas season television reruns in the 1980s and 1990s. Reviewers and readers of Five People have remarked, however, on its similarity to the Dickens classic and Capra's movie. Like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, and George Bailey, the hero of It's a Wonderful Life, Albom's protagonist, Eddie, is permitted a supernatural overview of his life. Neither George (memorably played by James Stewart, Princeton ('32) nor Scrooge actually enter heaven for their lessons. Driven to the verge of suicide, George gets a tour of the moral nightmare that would have befallen his community had he never lived; the fact that his guide through the land of what-might-have-been is a cute, cuddly, whimsical angel is one of the sentimental embarrassments that has made certain movie purists reluctant to allow this masterpiece into the pantheon of great films. Eddie, on the other hand, really does lose his life. An 83-year-old maintenance man at an amusement park, he dies attempting to save a little girl after one of the rides malfunctions. Though he was not contemplating suicide, he was resigned to the fact that his life was dreary and pointless. The central lesson he learns in heaven resembles the one revealed to George Bailey: that there is a divine symmetry in the way human lives and earthly events interconnect.

Five People's hold on its many readers has nothing to do with Eddie's appeal as a character, or the brilliance of the writing. Although Albom is capable of nice touches, such as the moment when Eddie thinks "how strange it was to be growing old in a place that smelled of cotton candy," what people relate to, along with the consoling idea of a sort of heavenly seminar on life's lessons, are homilies like "Strangers are just the family you have yet to come to know" or "Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it, you're just passing it on to someone else." The book's online detractors dismiss it as "a fast McRead," full of "bumpersticker philosophy" and "fast-food spirituality." Admirers speak of the hope it gives them: "It made me feel so damn good at the end, I just couldn't believe what this little book was capable of doing." A common reaction of its fans is to confess that they were moved to tears by the ending. True enough, Albom seems to have touched readers without exploiting them emotionally, in spite of a tendency to pour it on, particularly at the end, where the tears flow freely and he seems to be urging us to cry along with Eddie ("a flood of tears soaked through his fingers," "he wailed," "he wept and wept," "a tear rolled down Eddie's face," he "sobbed a final, vacant sob"). This is not a book for discerning or demanding readers. Too often the author resorts to capitalization for emphasis ("FORGIVE ME, OH GOD!" "WHAT HAVE I DONE?"). Or he indulges in overkill: "his soul was ambushed with [he must mean "by"] old emotions, and his lips began to tremble, and he was swept into the current of all that he had lost." Or he runs into metaphorical traps: "As if to feed the weakest embers of a fire, Eddie let a wrinkle of pride crack the veneer of his disinterest."

The novel's limitations become all the more evident in contrast to Tuesdays with Morrie, in which Albom had the advantage of writing about a real person in a real-life situation. It's impossible not to admire a unique, articulate, intelligent human being facing death with grace and good humor. Eddie comes off as neither unique, articulate or intelligent. Had Albom been able to portray him as vividly and appealingly as he did Morrie, Five People would have been a worthy sequel; by using virtually the same cover design, the publisher obviously hoped readers of Morrie would expect exactly that. Albom had the good sense to let Morrie be Morrie. His affection for his old teacher comes through with a genuineness that's missing in the novel. It's worth mentioning that numerous online admirers of Tuesdays with Morrie had little patience with The Five People You Meet in Heaven, finding it, in the words of one reader, "manipulative, predictable and lacking in sincerity."

But also wildly popular. Would this have been the case if Morrie hadn't already attracted a willing audience? It's also not unlikely that the public was primed for a book offering a fictional heaven with answers to soothe the wound inflicted by September 11. Albom's novel appeared in September 2003.

Hail, Jimmy Stewart

The Capra notion of art combined with popular appeal was brilliantly embodied by the movie star who was the true hero of It's a Wonderful Life. The day he came to Princeton, Frank Capra made special mention of James Stewart, the Princeton graduate whose energy and passion and genius for ranging from moments of great intimacy to moments of suicidal despair make his portrayal of George Bailey one of the great performances in the American cinema.