Book Review: The Five People You Meet In Heaven

When Chris gave me my Christmas presents this year, I was surprised to see something that looked like it may possibly be a book. I’ve been asking him for years to buy me books, and he always complained that I had too many of them and would buy me things that he claimed that I either needed or would never buy for myself (clothing, shoes, a toothbrush…)

I was impressed by his boldness before even opening the gift -- buying a book for me is not an easy task unless I specifically mention which one I want. And Chris is not exactly a book person -- in my mind, I picture him walking into Barnes and Noble looking to pick something out for me to be like the way I am when I walk into American Eagle to try to buy him a shirt: dazed, confused, clueless, and helpless. I imagine him walking up to the cashier and asking “if this book doesn’t fit him, can I return it?”

I didn’t really know anything about this book except that I thought it was some kind of Oprah shit designed to give you a… what the fuck does she call it… an “uh-huh!” moment? An “ah-ha!“ moment? A “light bulb” moment? A sphincter-clenching moment? I expected it to be preachy, obvious, contrived, and cringe-worthy, and I felt guilty that I’d have to lie to him about whether or not I liked it.

For the most part my assumptions were accurate, except that I found myself enjoying it despite the emphatic protests of all the weeping angels of my better judgement. To be fair, I was definitely grading the book on a curve considering where it came from, but even my most generous mindset couldn’t forgive the opening paragraph --

“This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.”


Right from the start this made me angry and immediately put me on the defensive as a reader. From the second line it manages establish a pontificating, sententious tone and seems to set itself up for a couple of hundred pages of trite moralizing and giving us “revelations” about the struggles of every day life.

Again, for the most part this was the case -- a few chapters in, we get this earth-shattering truth revealed to us:

“But we barely knew each other. I might as well have been a stranger.”
The blue man put his warms on Eddie’s shoulders. Eddie felt that warm, melting sensation.
“Strangers,” the Blue Man said, “are just family you have yet to come to know”.


(I think Marge Simpson said it better and more concisely at the end of the musical version of A Streetcar Named Desire [directed by Llewellyn Sinclair] when she sang “A stranger’s just a friend you haven’t yet…”)

So why am I giving this three stars? Well, despite its obvious flaws that anyone that has ever read anything that wasn’t an Oprah book club selection can point out, it made me cry a couple of times. And because I’m a sappy, sentimental fool. And because I’m a sucker for books about old people. And because it was a Christmas gift (this alone is worth a half star -- I would’ve given it 2 ½ otherwise) (this is probably why I could never review anything professionally).

I found myself becoming gradually attached to Eddie as the book plodded along -- he’s essentially just a placeholder, but being taken through his entire life from birth to death was an effective way of making you care about him in the absence of any actual plot or character development. The parts that deal with him and his wife were surprisingly emotional and well written and seemed out of place in the rest of the book -- they could maybe have been lifted from here and transplanted into some random Nicholas Sparks novel without missing a beat. My eyes were dripping like pre-cum down the side of a penile foreskin for the last couple of chapters, although if anyone had asked I would have lied and said I was crying tears of joy because it was almost over.

Most “serious” readers don’t need to waste their time with it, although it moves along quickly (I finished it in about three hours -- I have to admit, it was tough to put down) . For anyone looking for something a little bit light, or something kind of sweet, or someone who tends to like these kinds of books, though, it’s worth a read.