The Five People You Meet in Heaven

The Five People You Meet in Heaven is a book that grows on you as you read it. At the beginning, it was hard for me to care about Eddie, the old maintenance man at Ruby Pier. What kept me going for a while was the writing. Mitch Albom has an incredibly fluid style with bold, often surprising imagery. Toward the beginning, Eddie makes an animal out of pipe cleaners for a little girl who is described thus: "She had blonde curls and wore flip-flops and denim cutoff shorts and a lime green T-shirt with a cartoon duck on the front." Specifics like these make the world of the book come alive.
At choice moments, Albom states universal truths with a simple authority. One of Eddie's biggest struggles is with his abusive father. Late in the book, the narrator says, "Through it all, despite it all, Eddie privately adored his old man, because sons adore their fathers through even the worst behavior. It is how they learn devotion." What gives a writer the gall to say such a thing? Is it true? I'm not sure, but I know Mitch Albom thinks it is, and it certainly makes me want to believe it.
Each person that meets Eddie shows him an episode in his life and helps him to see it from a different point of view, one that makes the world make more sense. The message of the novel seems to be an altered Romans 8:28, that everything works out for everybody, that (except for maybe Japanese soldiers) everyone's life makes sense in an interconnected tapestry. God does not appear until the very end, and even then, his voice is the "melded voices" of others. Terrible things happen in this world, but some of the worst things are reconciled in Heaven in really beautiful ways. I came away from the book with a renewed conviction that there are much deeper things going on in the lives of people around me than I realize.
One thing bothered me about the point of view in the book. Ruby seemed more omniscient than the blue man or the captain. While they had stuck to their own stories and the places where they had intersected with Eddie's story, Ruby started telling things about Eddie's father that she couldn't have known in her own life. It seemed too big a shift.
Teen-agers would really like The Five People You Meet in Heaven. I can imagine all sorts of good stuff coming out of reading journals on this book. It would be a great summer reading book because it is short, very readable, and thought-provoking.