Great Books Archives - Page 9 of 26

Frankenstein Meets Faust

“My Dear Managers,
Are we at war then? If you still want peace, here is my ultimatum….
If you do not meet these conditions, tonight you will present Faust in a cursed house.
A word to the wise is sufficient.
O.G.”

Who is the O.G.? (No, not Ice-T.) It’s the mysterious Opera Ghost in Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera. You have undoubtedly run across this tale at some point. With over a dozen movie versions and one of the most successful Broadway spectacles of all time, it is safe to say this story has become part of the culture.

Reading the book is a bit jarring. At one level, the story is roughly the same as the Broadway or movie versions. Opera House in Paris is haunted by a guy named Eric, who has a disfigured face, hides in the cellars, moves about through endless secret passages, trains Christine to be a great singer by coaching her through the walls of her dressing room; Christine falls in love with Raoul; Eric doesn’t like that, kidnaps her, and takes her to his lair from which she is rescued. Stated baldly, the story is a penny dreadful tale meant to be sold in a cheap paperback edition. Sure enough Gaston Leroux specialized in that sort of tale in the early 20^th century;he wrote a lot of mystery tales, but Phantom is the only one which still sees the light of day.

Since the plot is exactly what you expect, why is it jarring to read the novel? To start: there is nothing romantic or dashing about the Phantom. He is a very creepy guy, stalking a young woman before hauling her off to his even creepier underground lair complete with a torture chamber. The torture chamber itself becomes the focus of an interminable section toward the end of the book. (Suffice it to say that the torture chamber is absurd.) The Phantom has absolutely no redeeming features; he is truly a mean and nasty piece of work. A comic book villain.

On the other side of Christine is the rather uninspiring Raoul. It is hard to find anything that Christine sees in the guy. So, you are left with Christine trapped between a creepy stalker and a thoroughly dull love interest. Then add in the mysterious Persian, who is so incomprehensible as a character, he gets left out of the musical. The chief purpose of the Persian, who knows Eric’s backstory, seems to be to allow the narrator to pretend this is a true story; without the Persian, the narrator would have no way to know Eric’s origin story. Despite being a cartoon villain, Eric’s origin story is unworthy of its own tale.

The Phantom of the Opera is really nothing more than a zillion other schlocky mystery/suspense novels. Truly nothing here that rises above a decent way to spend an evening when you want some formulaic entertainment. So, how did it become so famous?

After reading it, I wrote one of my former students who is obsessed with Broadway musicals in general and Phantom in particular. She cleared up my confusion.

First, she noted that in the various incarnations of the story, the director gets to make a choice about the nature of Eric. He isn’t always a cruel cartoon villain. He can also be a victim or a mysterious romantic figure. As Eric takes on assorted personas, the story subtly shifts; the more romantic Eric is, the less creepy he becomes and the more Christine can fall in love with him. Similarly, if you play up his victimhood, then you can arouse sympathy for him. Morph Eric and you can turn this into a story with a bit more depth than exists in the novel.

Second, my former student pointed out that The Phantom is an incarnation of an even earlier morphable literary figure: Frankenstein’s monster. Here we have a person who is rejected by the world and resorts to a life of violence. Do the sufferings of the monster or the phantom justify the later violence? Do we pity the monster or the phantom? Are either of them really capable of love?

The Phantom of the Opera is thus the equivalent of a myth, and that is what explains its staying power. The importance of myth to this story is related to another curious feature of the book. The novel, published in 1910, assumes the reader is acquainted the opera in general and Faust in particular. There are a lot of references to Faust, and Leroux spends no time at all explaining them to the reader. Once I realized this, I was stunned. Imagine a word in which a book with no real literary pretensions assumes the Reader is acquainted with the details of an opera (trivia question: who wrote the famous Faust opera?) and the story on which the opera was based (second trivia question: who wrote Faust?). Once upon a time, the readers of the equivalent of the thriller of the moment could be assumed to know such things. Now? Obviously not. Yet, understanding the nature of Christine requires knowing that she is singing the part of Marguerite in Faust at the insistence of the Phantom. That is rather chilling, but totally lost if the reader knows nothing about Faust and Marguerite. (Answers: Gounod and Goethe.)

If you are so inclined, you can now give The Phantom of the Opera literary street cred by saying it is Frankenstein meets Faust. That is actually not a bad description, but it does make you think the novel has more depth than it actually has.

Thomas Paine’s Twitter Account

Tom Paine would have loved the Internet. He would have been a master of the vicious comment on other people’s Tweets. His Facebook rants would have circulated widely. He was born too soon.

Then again, because he was born in an age where you had to write essays longer than a blog post, he is still worth reading. Consider Common Sense.

First, a digression: When I was 9 and 10 years old (4^th and 5^th grade), I was fascinated by the Revolutionary War. I loved reading about it. I have a vivid memory of finding a book with the complete list of battles in the Revolutionary War, and thinking that such information was unbelievably invaluable, the sort of thing that simply needed to be preserved for easy reference, I sat down and copied the whole list onto several sheets of paper (it’s a long list when you have the oversized handwriting of a 9 year old). (Note for youngsters: this was in the pre-internet era, so Google was not yet your friend.) I also, for reasons I cannot explain, was particularly excited when copying over said list to discover that there were two battles of Saratoga, the second one duly named “The Second Battle of Saratoga.” (I suppose being unbelievably excited about finding this list was a pretty good indication of the type of career toward which I was heading—though interestingly enough, never once in my life—and I mean never—did someone say to me, “You should be a college professor.”) I also have a vivid memory of excitedly discovering in the library a whole book devoted to Spies in the Revolutionary War. This Revolutionary War thing you may have heard about was a Big Deal.

In the course of my reading about this War, I kept seeing references to a book by Thomas Paine entitled Common Sense. It seems at this most exciting time of history, when people were saying really exciting things like “Give me liberty or give me death!” and “I regret I have but one life to give for my country!” that this book by Paine was electrifying. In an era of exciting rhetoric, this seemed to be the most exciting book of all. So, I decided that since reading about the Revolutionary War was about the most exciting type of reading there was, then reading the most exciting book from this most exciting time period would be the sort of thing that would send Young Jimmy Hartley into Paroxysms of Joy.

So, on my next voyage to the Public Library, I boldly marched up to the Front Desk, looked keenly into the eye of the librarian, an elderly woman (well, she seemed elderly to me, so that means she must have been somewhere between 40 and 100), and said in my most reverent, excited, and undoubtedly slightly hesitant (after all, I was about to talk to The Librarian) voice, “Do you have a copy of Common Sense by Thomas Paine?”

The Librarian….scowled. “Yes,” she said in a vaguely disapproving voice. “It would be in the Adult section,” she added. And right then I knew the “Adult” section was not the place Young Jimmy Hartley belonged. The Adult section was obviously the place for books which young people like me really shouldn’t be reading. The Librarian then told me to follow her and we went to the Adult section. She found the book and gave it to me with that look that said, “Kid, you are never going to read this book.” I checked it out, took it home. It sat on my dresser for a bit. I finally got up the courage to open it to the first page, looked at that page, but knowing I probably shouldn’t be reading this book, I never quite managed to convince myself to start it. Two weeks later the book went back to the library. Unread.

(I never again entered the adult section of that library. Never. We moved when I was 14, and (fear not) I have been to the adult sections of other libraries. I also checked out adult paperbacks from that library because, you see, the paperbacks were in a rack that was near the checkout desk, so I didn’t actually have to enter the Adult section.)

For three and a half decades, I had this nagging feeling that I should read Common Sense. But, I have never read it. Was I really old enough yet? Am I sure it would be a book I would like? Maybe it was really boring. Maybe that librarian was right that the book just wasn’t for me. I finally read it—35 years after I first checked it out.

The first thing to note is that it is highly unlikely that 200 years from now any kid is going to have the same experience wondering what was contained in the musings of the Great Twitter Warriors of today. Maybe we should bring back the pamphlet!

The second thing to note is that Common Sense, which I recently reread, is actually quite good. By the end I was ready to throw off the despotism of the English Crown. It did all seem like so much common sense.

It begins with an interesting distinction between “society” and “government,” a distinction about which many people still seem unaware. If there is a problem, is it the job of society or government to find a solution? The dividing line these days is between those who think there is a difference between those two possible answers and those who are confused about the question.

It also has a curious passage in which Paine seems to suggest that democracy, and not despotism, was the original form of government. At one level all these prehistoric ruminations are just prehistoric science fiction, but it is hard to believe that governments arose when a bunch of people just started chatting about how to improve their lives. I find it much easier to imagine the strongest guy subjected others. Paine also offers an early version of the argument that democracies do not go to war with one another.

But the real charm of Common Sense is theinvective—those who oppose Paine’s preferred scheme of government “would have joined Lucifer in his revolt.” Or this: “Though I would carefully avoid giving unnecessary offence, yet I am inclined to believe, that all those who espouse the doctrine of reconciliation, may be included within the following descriptions. Interested men, who are not to be trusted; weak men who cannot see; prejudiced men who will not see; and a certain set of moderate men, who think better of the European world than it deserves; and this last class by an ill-judged deliberation, will be the cause of more calamities to this continent than all the other three.”

I was talking about this book with a couple of former students, and one of them pointed to this bit: “But if you have [suffered at the hands of the British], and can still shake hands with the murderers, then are you unworthy the name husband, father, friend, or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward, and the spirit of a sycophant.” Now that, sadly, could be the mantra of the modern world for offenses far less than the actual murder of a loved one. Like I said, Paine would have loved living in the modern age. Then again, it is no longer clear his invective would stand out.

Reading Gravestones in Spoon River

Imagine you are dead and have the chance to explain yourself to the living. You can have up to roughly two dozen lines of free verse to say it. This will be your epitaph, the final word on your life.

What would you say?

Spoon River Anthology is a collection of a couple hundred such epitaphs. Crafted by Edgar Lee Masters in the early 20^th Century, it captures the life of a small town in the Midwest by allowing the dead to speak one last time. It’s a fictional town; well mostly—the book was long banned from use in the public schools in Masters’ hometown, because the locals all had copies in which they penciled in the real names of the fictional characters.

The copy I own is the 100^th Anniversary Edition, with a back cover proclaiming “The freshness of this masterpiece undiminished, Spoon River Anthology remains a landmark of American literature.” Publisher’s hyperbole? Depends on how you measure such things. Individual poems are a staple in high school literature anthologies, so there is that. But, is it worth reading straight through 250 pages of fictional epitaphs?

A century ago, the book was all the rage. The idea of telling the story of a town through a long series of monologues is rather clever. Each entry tells a story. You now know that person. Ah, but turn the page and there is another story which contradicts the story you just read. It turns out husbands and wives or parents and children have very different ways of seeing the same thing. If nothing else, this book is a rather good way to force you to realize that the story you just imagined telling about your own life might, much to your shock, come out different than how you are mentioned in the stories of others.

Part of the sensation of this book when it was first published is irrecoverable. Take A. D. Blood:

If you in the village think that my work was a good one,
Who closed the saloons and stopped all playing at cards,
And haled old Daisy Fraser before Justice Arnett,
In many a crusade to purge the people of sin;
Why do you let the milliner’s daughter Dora,
And the worthless son of Benjamin Pantier
Nightly make my grave their unholy pillow?

Are you shocked? Now back up a hundred years and imagine the shock of a book that has a couple engaging in an illicit union on a grave. And the whole image is just tossed out there in the last line of a seven line poem. Living in the 21^st century, you weren’t shocked. But, readers at the time of publication were…which presumably did not put a damper on sales.

A hundred years later, Blood’s epitaph illustrates the limitations of the book as a whole. That particular poem is noticeable; you read it, hit that last line, and you can’t help but notice. But, not every story can end with a killer line. Not every story can reveal that a previously told story may not have been entirely true. Most stories are stand-alone, the voice of an individual unlike the other individuals in the book. After reading a hundred such stories, are you eager to see the 101^st? After 150, still going strong?

I mentioned this feature of the book to a friend of mine, who laughed at me and asked for which book of poetry this is not true. Which poet can I read poem after poem straight through for 30 or 60 minutes? Obviously, none. Then it dawned on me: this really is a book of poetry. I read the whole thing trying to force it into the genre of epic poem, telling a story. But, this isn’t The Odyssey or Paradise Lost. It is North of Boston or Lyrical Ballads. Sure some of the poems connect, but it really is just a series of poems.

As a book of poetry, is it good. Yes. Is it Great? Ah, that will hinge entirely on how often a poem causes your attention level to rise. It is hard to know how often that will happen for you.

An example: the poem which grabbed my attention and won’t let go is the story of Seth Compton:

When I died, the circulating library
Which I built up for Spoon River,
And managed for the good of inquiring minds,
Was sold at auction on the public square,
As if to destroy the last vestige
Of my memory and influence.
For those of you who could not see the virtue
Of knowing Volney’s “Ruins” as well as Butler’s “Analogy”
And “Faust” as well as “Evangeline,”
Were really the power in the village,
And often you asked me,
“What is the use of knowing the evil in the world?”
I am out of your way now, Spoon River,
Choose your own good and call it good.
For I could never make you see
That no one knows what is good
Who knows not what is evil;
And no one knows what is true
Who knows not what is false.

As even semi-regular readers of this here space will know, it is not hard to figure out why Seth Compton resonated so deeply with me. He died; mission unaccomplished. I guess if he had succeeded, I would not have a mission. Then again, he wasn’t real. But, if Seth Compton is right, and I obviously think he is, then many people won’t find this particular poem interesting at all.

Should you read this book? It is fun, easy to read, and has enough characters that surely you will find some appealing. I suspect, however, that the real reason to read this book straight through is that you can afterwards have it on your shelf where it will constantly provide something to do in an idle minute when you flip open the book at random and remember some of the denizens of Spoon River on the off chance that the person whose tale you are reading will give you some insight into your trials of the moment.

Return of the Furies

Now when the sudden blows come down,
let no one sound the call that once brought help,
‘Justice, hear me—Furies throned in power!’
Oh I can hear the father now
Or the mother sob with pain
At the pain’s onset…hopeless now,
The house of Justice falls.

That is the Furies raging at the end of Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, the trilogy tracing the fall of the house of Agamemnon and the rise of Athens. (Robert Fagles’ masterful translation.)

In a recent post, I ruminated that one of the problems with contemporary political discussion is that people do not spend enough time reading Aristotle. Now, truth be told, Aristotle requires some patience to read; his works do not have the charm of watching Socrates go to work in a Platonic Dialogue. So, I understand why people are not flocking to read Politics, even though it would be quite beneficial to do so.

But Aeschylus also provides a remarkable reflection on contemporary society. And he wrote plays! Plays with murders and intrigue and Furies hounding the guy who murdered his mother and Greek gods and Goddesses showing up and the first ever jury trial! Coming soon to Netflix! Or HBO! Well, actually, I have not heard of an Oresteia series being made, but it really does have all the elements of compelling TV.

The story can be told as a list of deaths:

1. Tantalus’s son Pelops had two sons, Thyestes and Atreus. Thyestes seduced Atreus’ wife in order to get the throne. Atreus, not pleased about this, killed Thyestes’ two sons and then made a meal of the sons and served it to Thyestes. (This, by the way, was an imitation of a bit of family history: Atreus’ grandfather killed Atreus’ father and served the father as a meal to the gods.)

2. Atreus retakes the throne, and has two sons, Agamemnon (who inherits the throne) and Menelaus (who marries the most beautiful woman in the word, Helen of Troy). After Paris runs off with Helen, Agamemnon raises an army to go fight the Trojans. But alas, the wind is unfavorable and the ships can’t get out of port. So, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, to the gods. The winds become favorable. But, for some reason, Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, is not happy that her husband sacrificed their daughter. Go figure. All of this is the background to The Oresteia.

3. Agamemnon returns victorious from the Trojan War. His wife meets him at the dock, rolls out the red carpet (literally) and Agamemnon comes home. Unbeknownst to Agamemnon, during his absence, Clytemnestra has taken up with Aegisthus, Thyestes’ son (not one of the sons who was served as dinner, obviously). Agamemnon walks into the palace and is immediately murdered by his wife. Aegisthus gets revenge for his father and, not incidentally, the throne.

4. Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, hears of the murder of his father and is not happy about it. With the help of his sister Electra, he gets into the palace under an assumed identity where he takes advantage of the hospitality of the royal couple by murdering his mother and her new husband.

5. Matricide is not looked upon with favor in ancient times. Enter the Furies, whose role in life is to pursue vile matricides to their deaths. Orestes races to Apollo, who sends him on to Athena. Orestes pleads with Athena for his life. The Furies rage that Orestes must die. Interesting moral problem: is it OK to murder the person who murders your father? Is it OK to murder your mother? And what do you do when your mother murdered your father? (As you might recall, Shakespeare also got some mileage out of this question.) Athena, ever the wise one, decides to settle the matter by a jury trial. Clever, but alas, the jury splits evenly, so Athena has to cast the deciding vote. And after all this death, Orestes is spared.

(Seriously…you would watch a Game of Thrones level production of that story, wouldn’t you? It is just sitting there, in the Public Domain no less, waiting to be done.)

Are you happy Orestes was spared? The Furies are not. Indeed, they are furious.

You, you younger gods!—You have ridden down
the ancient laws, wrenched them from my grasp—
and I, robbed of my birthright, suffering, great with wrath,
I lose my poison over the soil, aieee!—
poison to match my grief comes pouring out my heart,
cursing the land to burn it sterile and now
rising up from its roots a cancer blasting leaf and child,
now for Justice, Justice!—cross the face of the earth
the bloody tide comes hurling, all mankind destroyed.
… Moaning, only moaning? What will I do?

Note the content of the Furies complaint. They want Justice. Remember the crime for which they want Justice is matricide, which I think we all still agree is indeed a vile crime. But, Justice is thwarted by the apparatus of this new-fangled court system thing. A man who murdered his mother is set free. Where is the Justice in that? And so, the Furies pledge to loose their poison onto the soil, cursing the land and burning it sterile. The Furies are taking it to the streets.

Poll Time: Who is right? The Furies or Athena? Second Poll: Once Orestes is set free, are the Furies doing the right thing, even though it means “the bloody tide comes hurling, all mankind is destroyed”?

This is why we read Aeschylus, by the way. Or at least it is why we should read Aeschylus. You don’t actually care what happens to Orestes, but you do care about Justice. Strip the matter of Justice from the passions of the day, and wrestle with it in the passions of another day. It doesn’t take long in thinking about The Oresteia to realize that Justice is an enormously complicated matter. Solving the quandary here is not something that can be done on a bumper sticker or in a 1000 word op-ed or on a Facebook post or with a bullhorn. Figuring out Justice, really thinking it through, takes some time and hard thought.

If you can’t figure out what should happen to Orestes, why are you so confident you know all the answers about the issues of the day? Maybe the violent emotional response of the Furies is the right course of action. Maybe the cool calculation of Athena is the better route. But, before burning down the city or condemning those who do, is it too much to ask that we all first pause and think about this?

Gatsby, Huck, and the American Dream

“I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

You can hear the sigh of despair in Nick’s voice at the end of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. But, why the despair?

The West, after all, is the Land of Promise. It is a rather important part of the American Story. Go West, Young Man! Trivia time: what is the origin of that phrase? Often attributed to Horace Greely (19^th century newspaperman), nobody can find a record of him actually writing or saying it. So, nobody knows the origin of the phrase. Yet, if you want a phase that captures the American Spirit of the West, it is hard to do better. Go West!

What happens when you Go West? You make your Fortune! You live Free! Unbounded possibilities! Take Jay Gatsby. He meets a girl, but alas, she comes from a higher social circle than his. In any other time or any other place, the story ends there. But Gatsby is from the West, so he knows this is not the end of the story. He sets out to make his fortune. He rises to the top.

The Great Gatsby starts off like every other Horatio Alger novel. Poor kid meets someone who gives him an opportunity and the kid seizes the opportunity and becomes wealthy and lives happily ever after. Rags to Riches! Only in America! It isn’t just fictional stories. It’s the American Story! Booker T Washington’s Up From Slavery is exactly the same story. The financial titans of the late 19^th and early 20^th century often started with nothing. Gatsby is just an example of the American Dream.

Except…it doesn’t work. Gatsby becomes extraordinarily wealthy…and ends up dead in his pool.

What happened? This isn’t the way the story was supposed to end, right? Gatsby gets rich, Daisy is still waiting for him, and they marry and live happily ever after. Alright, Daisy got married in the meantime, but that’s OK; Tom quietly quits the scene, leaving Daisy free to head off with Gatsby. OK, Daisy isn’t leaving Tom, but Jordan is there as an acceptable substitute for Daisy and Gatsby marries her instead and heads off into the sunset, living happily ever after. OK, Jordan won’t work out, but at least Gatsby finds joy in being the star of the Cool Kids as they all come to His Parties and He is The Man.

But, no. Gatsby is shot in his pool for something he did not do. But, at least his funeral was a grand affair with Everyone Who Is Anyone there and nary a dry eye in sight. Nope, not that either. Nick:

I found myself on Gatsby’s side, and alone….At first I was surprised and confused; then, as he lay in his house and didn’t move or breathe or speak, hour upon hour, it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested—interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which every one has some vague right at the end.

Remember, Nick is not a childhood friend or someone who has been with Gatsby through thick and thin. He just happens to be the guy who rented the summer cottage next door to Gatsby’s place. Nick, Gatsby’s father, and the minister are the entire crowd at the funeral.

Remember the American Dream? It is not just Gatsby who is floating dead in that pool. The American Dream died there too. There is no optimistic future possible. You can’t change your situation in life, you can’t rise to the top, there are no riches that come to those in rags. In the end, the past wins and we all go on living the lives into which we were born. You can Go West, but the East always wins. You can go to America, but the long reach of your homeland keeps you from rising.

The Great Gatsby is a Great Novel, but is it The Great American Novel? Is it the tale that most captures what it means to be American? It can only play that role if the American Dream is dead. And therein lies the question at the root of the entire story. Is the American Experiment, the story that we can rise up above ourselves, that we can become a Great People, that we are not shackled by our past, is that Experiment a failure?

The story isn’t finished. If the American Dream dies, then Gatsby was a prescient novel indeed. But, what if the Dream is not dead? That is the funny thing about Dreams; you can always go on dreaming. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ends on that note of promise, “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” The Dream lives on. You don’t have to accept the constraints of bein’ sivilized by Aunt Sally.

Fitzgerald and Twain thus make a marvelous pair of books for thinking about the American Dream. Combined, they show the power of literature to be greater than mere texts to be analyzed. Both of these books portray a nuanced view of the American Experiment; neither portrays the country as without virtues or without flaws. Read them in tandem and then ask: Assume that the stories told in both of these books are accurate portrayals of the society. Which book’s conclusion is right? Is the American Dream really dead or is there a reason to go on Dreaming?

Blessed Assurance

In the mid-1960s, a small volume showed up in the world and since then 2.5 billion copies have been published. Think about that: 2.5 billion. For perspective, consider Harry Potter: including all seven volumes and the companion books, there have been 500 million copies sold. So, this 1960s work is a Big Deal. The book, or more properly booklet: The Four Spiritual Laws by Bill Bright.

Now that kind of distribution has not surprisingly generated a rash of slim volumes which hope to become The Four Spiritual Laws 2.0. Obviously these new volumes won’t be freely distributed by Campus Crusade for Christ, but maybe if they are small enough and inexpensive enough they could get some traction. After all, even a mere 0.1% of The Four Spiritual Laws distribution is 2.5 million copies! (Again for comparison, Michelle Obama’s book sold half that number.)

Enter Dean Inserra. He is the pastor of City Church Tallahassee, with an average Sunday attendance in the range of 1200-1500 people. That is a big church. Inserra obviously has the ability to communicate well. So, he wrote a slim volume: Without A Doubt: How to Know for Certain That You’re Good with God.

First, the Good. This is a thoroughly orthodox (small-o) Christian volume. Sentence by sentence, there is literally no place where I thought “This is wrong.” It is perfectly solid evangelical Protestant theology. If you handed this out in Baptist churches across the country, I have a hard time imagining there would be any pushback at all on the content.

It is also a chatty book with an informal style. Since it is really short, it can be read quickly. The obvious hope with a book like this is that people will buy copies and give them to their friends. Sure, 2.5 million copies sold is unrealistic, but maybe 0.01% of the distribution of The Four Spiritual Laws?

Unfortunately, for a book with nothing objectionable in the sentence by sentence content, the structure is a bit of a mess. Start with the question: who exactly is the audience for this book?

It isn’t hard to see who Inserra imagines his audience to be. The book starts imagining someone lying awake at night worried about whether they have a right relationship with God. The introductory chapter is “The Question that Keeps You Up at Night.” So one might reasonably expect a book on Assurance. That would indeed be a nice topic for a quick little volume.

But, immediately after setting up the question, Inserra starts talking about people who have False Assurance. And therein lies the first big structural problem. Inserra never seems to realize that people with False Assurance do not lie awake at night wondering if they are right with God. People with False Assurance have assurance, after all. Inserra thinks they should not have assurance though. If you believe you are right with God simply because you think there is a God out there or because you are not the most evil person who ever lived or because your grandparents were right with God, then Inserra thinks you should have less Assurance than you do. So, a good part of this book is telling people to stop being so assured.

It isn’t Assurance that Inserra is preaching, it is Assurance for the Right Reason. Now that too is a perfectly good argument for a book, but it is not the argument that was set up at the outset of the book. The outset imagines someone lying awake at night with incomplete assurance, and Inserra proceeded to address his argument to people who were not having that problem in the first place. In other words, a good part of this book is not “How to Know for Certain that You’re Right With God,” but rather “How to be Right With God.”

But, the structural problems get worse later on. Having explained how to get right with God and insisting that you can be assured you are right with God, Inserra turns to the always tricky passage in Hebrews 6 about people who leave the faith. Apostates should not have assurance that they are right with God, obviously. But, Inserra just leaves the problem hanging out there. If I have a Right Faith, how can I be assured I will not later become apostate? How can I be assured I am not currently apostate? Should I lie awake at night worried that even though I am not currently apostate, I might later become so? How can I be assured this is impossible?

These problems arise because Inserra is confusing the general promises of God with the belief that those general promises apply to a particular individual. For example, Inserra tells us that assurance comes from believing what God has said in Scripture. If we think God is a liar, then we have no reason for assurance. But, if we don’t think God is a liar, then since he has assured us of his Love, we have nothing about which to worry.

That just confuses the matter. First, I can believe that God is not a liar, believe he gives assurance to those on whom his favor rests, but still wonder if I am one of those people. Second, I can believe that God is not a liar, that he has said that people who are really, really good go to heaven, and thus have perfect assurance that God will do what I believe he said. Asserting that we have assurance because God is not a liar gives no assurance to the first person and wrong assurance to the second,

So, how can we be assured? And this is where a funny thing happens on the path to assurance. It turns out that the ultimate source of assurance is…works. You know you have assurance because your faith in God bears fruit. Now, again, there is nothing wrong with what Inserra is saying, but it makes a mess of the way he has structured the book. Imagine Rex who thinks he is right with God because he is a really nice guy. Inserra comes along and says “No, you are not saved by your works. You are saved by faith in Jesus Christ.” Rex asks “What does it mean to have faith in Jesus Christ? Where can I get assurance that I am right with God?” And Inserra answers, “You’ll know you are right with God if you have good works.” And Rex says, “Done!”

Now this is obviously not what Inserra wants to say to Rex. But, because this book lacks a clear audience, it is exactly the sort of tangle Inserra ends up in when you try to put together the argument of this book. The problem with a book like this is that it is obvious that at no point in the writing or publishing process was the manuscript read by anyone with a skeptical ear. The book sounds right if you just float along with the prose, but as soon as you start connecting the dots, you realize the argument needs to be either vastly crisper or longer.

The best example of a chapter which could have used a reader who asks, “Why?” is the chapter on the “Marks of a Transformed Life.” Inserra notes, “I believe it is important to give tangible examples of what a life lived by a saving faith actually looks like, rather than simply talk in theoretical terms.” He then gives what amounts to a checklist. It is almost like Inserra is saying, “Do these things and you can be assured of your salvation.” He doesn’t quite say that, but it seems like he says that. The list is, shall we say, idiosyncratic. A Life of Repentance. Eternally Minded. Sound Doctrine. Spiritual Disciplines. Generosity. Heart for Those Who Do Not Know Christ. Love for God and His Church.

There is nothing wrong with anything in that list. All good things. But, compare that to the message of the earlier chapter “Essentials of Saving Faith.” There we have “the scriptures are our source for what we must believe, and the gospel is the essential business. Jesus Christ died for our sins. He was buried, and He rose from the grave.” There is the gospel message. That is what is essential. So, is the list of the “Marks of a Transformed Life” essential or nonessential? I truly have no doubt that Inserra could explain this. It is, after all, one of the staples of evangelical Protestantism to reconcile the statements “Salvation is by Faith Alone,” and “Faith without Works is Dead.” But, Inserra does not explain it in this book.

Instead right after the passage saying that the essentials are belief in the death and resurrection of Christ, we get what must be one of the most cringe-inducing things I have ever read in a Christian book: “If there was a NCAA basketball tournament style bracket for necessary Christian beliefs for saving faith, these would be the number one seeds.” Egads. If belief in the death of Jesus is the number one seed, does that mean it is possible that it could suffer an upset at the hands of the number 16 seed? And what exactly is the number 16 seed in this March Madness of Salvation? Inserra should know better than to write something like that. I am sure it was a great line when he delivered it in a church setting and everyone chuckled along. But, in a book seeking to explain the nature of assurance?

Inserra’s book thus could have been vastly better if it had been more forthright about the real source of assurance. While Christians are quick to say “Salvation come by faith,” they are oddly loath to acknowledge “Assurance comes by faith.” I would truly be shocked if Inserra disagrees that assurance comes by faith. The answer to “How can I know for certain that I am good with God?” is rather simply, “Ask God to give you more Faith.” If God is the source of assurance, and again, I am certain Inserra would agree, then as we draw closer to God, we will gain more assurance. This solution cuts right through all the problems above. “I believe. Help my unbelief.”

(Moody Press sent me a copy of the book in exchange for this review.)