Francine Rivers

            There are people who read expecting authors to express new ideas, new voices, new points of view, new characters, or new stories.

            And there are a lot of people who like Francine Rivers.

            From what I’ve read, those people are separate groups.

            Redeeming Love is an attempt at reworking the biblical story of Hosea and Gomer as a pioneer romance. This poses some obvious difficulties for the author—starting with Gomer’s being a prostitute no character trait other than infidelity, and Hosea being a prophet. (I’ve never found a convincing prophet in a novel.) Then consider the difficulties of deciphering historical cues as to the relationship between the biblical couple, and trying to transpose it into a world of 19^th-century American mores, and make it all marketable to a late-20^th-century conservative evangelical audience… It’s more than any author could be expected to fulfill, so don’t blame Francine Rivers for failing.

            Atonement Child, on the other hand, is a more traditional book, and can be more accurately held to traditional standards. It centers on the abortion issue, which, to judge by the literature resulting from it, must be an extremely difficult issue to write well about. I knew that going into it, and adjusted my expectations accordingly, and was still disappointed. No characters proved complex and no plots twisted unexpectedly. I’m not an expert on the contemporary Christian women genre, but before reading it, I could have told you, within a dozen pages, where to expect the family epiphany.

            I can’t imagine wanting to read another of her books, but I can imagine respecting those who do.

Tami Hoag

Night Sins… Yeah, that’s a book I knew I probably wouldn’t like, but it was recommended strongly by someone I respected, back before I realized that respecting a person didn’t mean you had to respect their book recommendations. It’s a trashy, middle-aged woman fantasy mystery of that type that describes male protagonists by comparing them to action movie stars and has said movie-star-like hero state repeatedly how much he likes the heroine’s small breasts.

It’s a cliffhanger, of the type that makes you wonder whether even the author knew who committed the murder until the chapter in which the murderer is revealed. Fortunately, by the end of the book, you probably won’t care which other characters die or go to jail.

For what it’s worth, neither Tami Hoag nor the woman who recommended her book to me is buxom.

David Baldacci

Hour Game is an innocuous, fairly brainless mystery of the type you’d be likely to find on “Summer Book” shelves in used book stores. The villain is predictable; the main characters don’t leave you wanting more; and it’s not that bad.

I’m not sure how authors pull off combinations like that.

Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins

I’ve heard that Tim LaHaye has written sex manuals for Christians.

I find that odd because Left Behind gave me the impression that LaHaye had never met a human being.

Here’s the scene: all the babies and young children on earth have disappeared. Planes are crashing because pilots disappeared. Driverless cars are crashing (for reasons their bumper stickers probably explain). And in the midst of all of this… There are people working at the information desk at the airport? There are people working at the airport ticket counters? There are people driving busses?

Seriously?

Come on! I rode inner-city busses every day for years. I know that a lot of those drivers didn’t believe in the Savior. But I also know that if their kids had suddenly disappeared, they wouldn’t be driving the damned bus.

But so many people loved it… and some of those people I care about very much… and some of those people bought the whole set, and kept asking me to give it another chance…

Which makes me wonder even more about that rumored sex manual.

In book 2 of the series, Tribulation Force, we find that the protagonist, Buck (I’m pretty sure that’s his name. All of the good guys have names like cowboy verbs, so it’s hard to keep straight.), who is a late-twenties, award-winning investigative journalist and television reporter, and who had no serious religious convictions until the previous book… this super-stud of the international jetset… well, he’s a virgin.

And not only that, but his beautiful, feminist, Stanford, co-ed dorm, non-religious girlfriend is also a virgin.

Huh?

Do LaHaye and Jenkins think that people just don’t get around to it?

The characters were so poorly drawn that it made me wonder if LaHaye could be wrong about other things as well.

I’d been raised in the same apocalyptic view LaHaye holds. I got all of his allusions, and knew his Bible references. But after reading his books, I went back to the Bible to see what it really said, without key-verse lists and commentaries to direct me.

A year later, I was convinced that the Bible doesn’t back him up.

I was on his side, and reading his books convinced me I was wrong. That’s bad.

But it’s not the worst.

He doesn’t make God look good.

That’s about the worst thing to say about an author who takes the Name.

John Grisham

John Grisham is a phenomenon to the point that I feel a little overawed writing all of this. People all over the world love him. I don’t. Could I be wrong?

I’ve given him a fair chance, I think: four fairly big books.

The Pelican Brief was first. The movie had just come out, and one of my students had loved it and told me I had to read the book. Not bad, I thought a few days later. A law student and investigative reporter dodge the FBI, CIA, and various hitmen as they try to uncover a plot to kill 2 supreme court justices. Fast, exciting, Mediocre dialogue and forced romance, but it keeps you turning pages. It’s mortal, but not bad.

The Rainmaker gave a fist-person account of a young law-school graduate trying to make it big. There was very little character development, predictable plot twists, and a whiney defense of the worst in the legal profession. Grisham didn’t say, “looks like Danny DeVito” in his description of the shrewd little pseudo-attorney, but the book felt like it was written with a film in mind. The film was better.

A few years later, again at a friend’s recommendation, I found myself reading The Partner. It was by far his best for character development and plot. My hope was renewed.

But then I got The Bleachers as a gift from well-meaning friends who thought I needed things to help me relax. An hour into reading it, my wife asked me to stop because I was scoffing too much. It’s unreadable.

But I saw the movie of The Firm, and it wasn’t bad. And the movie of The Rainmaker was much better than the book. And the film of Runaway Jury, which I haven’t read, was excellent.

I think I sense a pattern.

I’m looking forward to watching his next book.

Carrolly Erickson

If you have a personal aversion to mentioning unpleasant subjects, it would probably be wise not to choose a complex, scandalous character as the topic of your next biography.

Great Catherine combines terrible research and a profound faith in court records and authorized biographers with an aversion to common sense. The result is a strikingly favorable and clean biography of a woman who did not earn the word “Great” through her moral success. It’s sort of like reading a Bill Clinton biography that didn’t include any mention of Monica Lewinsky, or reading a George W. Bush biography that didn’t mention pre-Iraq War intelligence reports.

Sinclair Lewis

I have a lot of good-hearted relatives who don’t always listen to me. Hence, my introduction to Sinclair Lewis. I was in college, on a C.S. Lewis kick, and they came across several Sinclair Lewis books, and…

For starters, Sinclair Lewis won a Nobel Prize, and C.S. Lewis didn’t. Point one for Sinclair.

Sinclair Lewis was American. Maybe point two.

Sinclair Lewis became famous for undying loyalty to the myth of secular Superman, encased in bitter, snide remarks ripping apart the people whom he had called friends and neighbors. He left behind communities that hated him while he lived and who honored him posthumously with a two-room shack called a museum.

C.S. Lewis didn’t do those things. And people around the world still read C.S. Lewis.

So start with Main Street. It’s funny. It’s also just plain mean. How much imagination does it take to create a small-town female protagonist who feels sorry for herself? How much character insight does it take to describe Minnesotan hunters as not likely to sympathize with homosexual actors?

Babbit deals with many of the same themes, but this time skewering the business class for not appreciating art enough.

Elmer Gantry makes fun of traveling revival preachers who sin and hide it.

Arrowsmith, and Cass Timberlane are both vanity mirrors in which Sinclair Lewis tries to design protagonists who are ideal types. Unfortunately, his limited compassion results in heroes who are basically very smart boors who surround themselves with people who have less money, less education, and more family responsibilities, in order to brag about being rich, smart, and free.

So, if he’s so bad, why did I read four of his books?

He’s clever. He has some great phrases (“a Newfoundland dog of a man”). And I’m unfortunately inclined to trust Nobel Prize recommendations over my own sense.

Nick Hornby

High Fidelity and About a Boy are both funny movies. But as books, they’re hilarious. How to Be Good and A Long Way Down both made me smile, but they didn’t measure up.
The bottom line is that Nick Hornby is a very funny writer. He can set up great scenes, and he can build sympathy for unlikable losers. (Almost always. In A Long Way Down, I didn’t really care if a couple of them made it out of the suicide pact alive.)
When he stays on the funny stuff, he’s great.
But many of his characters eventually stiffen into props for “the lesson” that makes everyone happier and better. When it comes to waxing philosophical… well, Nick Hornby is a very funny man. It’s hard to imagine a sunnier stroll to nihilism.
Think of his books as longer, better-scripted episodes of Friends or Cheers. Laugh with them, but don’t expect to have them provide life’s answers.
If you’d like a sample of his wit without the underlying despair, check out 31 Songs. Hornby’s a good novelist, but he’s an excellent pop music reviewer, even if he doesn’t appreciate U2 as much as he should.

Dan Brown

There are over-rated blockbusters, and then there is The DaVinci Code, which pushes the term “over-rated” to such an extreme that the language needs to invent a new word.

I wasn’t overly put off by the concept of Jesus being married (laughable historically, but an interesting premise for fiction), or the Catholic church being corrupt (correct historically, but a clichéd premise for fiction). What turned me off from the beginning were absolutely astoundingly implausible events, such as:

1. a septuagenarian is able to run through the halls of the Louvre

2. he is able to do so faster than his gargantuan, physically fit assassin

3. when gut shot, he is still able to compose numerous riddles, including some in different wings of the Louvre that are hundreds of meters apart

4. and the riddles involve writing in his own blood

5. and the writing involves elaborate word puzzles dependent on spelling ability in a foreign language

6. and riddles end with the old man positioning his body so that his death posture (which is remarkably free from spasms or wrenchings, especially for a gut shot) will be a clue to the riddle

7. and that the riddles are, in the end, so simple that I solved several of them faster than I could read the explanation, and I’m not that good with riddles, but they were unsolvable by master sleuths

8. and the master sleuths just happened to be experts on symbology and code breaking

9. and ….

Forget the blasphemy against the origins of Scripture.

Forget the absolute lies presented as facts and defended as “fictionalizations” about such well-documented events as the Council of Nicea.

Forget the most blatant attack on monotheism in a novel since Skinny Legs and All.

It’s a terrible mystery.

Which, I suppose, is why no one forgets the issues I just listed; they were what made it a best-seller. If the same story had been told, using the same characters and clues, about something like whether Bill Clinton really knows what the meaning of “is” is, no one would have read it.

Randy Alcorn

Randy Alcorn is the type of writer who probably gets told things like, “You write very well for a preacher.”

I have no idea whether he is actually a preacher, but he writes well for one.

Deadline and Dominion are long sermons told via stories in which the characters talk in sermons.

This doesn’t mean they’re bad books. Just be aware of what you’re getting into. It’s an old hobby of socially-active writers (Balzac and Tom Clancy both jump to mind), but if it’s not done very well, it loses readers. Alcorn does it well.

Deadline is about a journalist whose life is falling apart, and who gets caught up in a mystery involving abortion and underground organ transplants. Dominion involves the Deadline hero’s friend, whose life is falling apart, and who gets caught up in a mystery involving corrupt politicians and racial violence.

And if you think these topics would be great place for discussing the virtues of universal healthcare, sex education, standard distribution practices for medical resources, gun control, or financial mismanagement by political conservatives…well, people of your political party probably wouldn’t like these books.

Oh yeah, and both books involve a storyline that takes place in heaven.

I can’t say I’m sorry I read them. They were decent quick reads. But I can say I would have enjoyed them more if the sermons had been reduced by 20% or so, and if the author weren’t prone to careless slips, like having a White character discussing problems facing Native Americans say, without any trace of irony, “I understand their reservations.”

And I prefer characters that can’t be summed up with three or four adjectives like, “big, loveable, black, troubled”.

In line with the fiction you’ll find in evangelical bookstores, Alcorn’s books outline the world in bold markers and put characters in neat boxes. It’s not an ambiguous place to be. At least he allows his characters to do things like have sex outside marriage—before they become Christians, of course, but it’s a step in the direction of having fiction that admits faulty people can show truth.