When God Writes Your Love Story, by Eric & Leslie Ludy

When God Writes Your Love Story is a book in the same vein as Boy Meets Girl, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, and Christian Courtship in an Oversexed World. As these others do, authors Eric and Leslie Ludy present the case for abstinence, prayerful marriage preparation, and deliberate, caring, dating. One aspect of this book, however, sets it apart from the rest -- it is the inclusion of the idea that young people ought to prepare for married life by living with one's family as one would with one's spouse. The authors offer helpful, specific suggestions on how to practice being selfless now so that one will be well-versed in selflessness once married -- they encourage women to respect and care for their fathers and brothers as they would their husbands, and they propose that men care for and learn about their sisters and mothers as if they were their wives.

Unfortunately, When God Writes Your Love Story shares an oversight with most other books in this genre: it is that they overlook ambitious young people and those who are happy with their temporary singlehood. This book & company always include a chapter telling the single person to keep his chin up, someone will come along soon -- but they never address one's love life in relation to a career, which gives the impression that these books are written only for those with no drive or clear path in life.

Though the authors' arguments are strong if not original, this book's real weakness lies in its writing. The Ludys are overly self-deprecating in their attempts at humor and humility. This becomes grating, as well as the fact that the authors lean too much on stereotypes to amuse the readers: their efforts are mostly based on the Mars-Venus assumption that while women are sensitive and angelic, their husbands are clueless, unhygienic brutes. Additionally, it's hard to take the book seriously because the writing itself is immature. It's far too excitable -- something that one could expect in a personal email, a blog post, or in a note taped to the refrigerator -- but hopefully not a published book.

The Corrections

The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, tells the story of the Lambert family from each member's perspective. Enid, the mother, wants everyone to get together for one last Christmas in St. Jude, and she wants everyone to be optimistic. This is troublesome, because Alfred, the father, has lost more and more of his lucidity to Parkinson's and dementia. Their firstborn, Gary, suffers from depression and a wife who can't stand his parents, while Chip, the second son, flies off to Eastern Europe to work for a would-be warlord, and youngest-child Denise can't decide who she is and what she really wants, and ends up losing her job because of it.

Life according to The Corrections is that in order to survive, you need something desperately -- but nobody will give it to you, because for them to survive, they desperately need to do the opposite of what you need. It's possible for you to fix the problem yourself, but that would require you to do the one thing you will never do, the one thing that goes against all your principles, the one thing that you can't do because you'd rather die. So really, it's impossible. So really, we are all in desperate need of something that we will never get. Life in the Lambert family also revolves around fixing mistakes. Not mistakes that need fixing at that moment -- but past mistakes. The novel explores how people live their lives as a correction of other people's lives, or as corrections of decisions made in their previous lives.

In The Corrections, Franzen portrays communication as ulitmately impossible and human relationships as ultimately nonexistent. What people talk to each other about, what people express to each other, is not what they really need. Because of this, nobody actually communicates themselves to anybody else, nobody really knows anybody else, nobody truly understands each other. Relationships are just people masking their desires and interacting with other masks. Families are people holding ten-foot poles, sliding and banging them against other people's ten-foot poles in an attempt to learn about the person on the other end of it. But even if people could bring themselves to express themselves, to ask for what they need most, it would still not help the state of things, because nobody can help anybody else. We are all ultimately alone.

Also depressing is the characters' complete lack of ethics. Alfred thinks he's ethical -- but in reality, he's just guilt-ridden and Puritan. Once, Denise thinks to herself that she's probably doing something wrong, but then she keeps doing it. Without thinking about it or contemplating the ethics of the situation, the other family members continually do and say selfish things that often hurt each other. Franzen himself seems to agree that a lack of ethics is depressing as well as, well, unethical -- most of the time when a character does something wrong, he is actually screwing himself over.

Despite it's darknesses, The Corrections is also really funny at times. The situations that some people get themselves into and the offhand comments that a few of them make are ridiculous, hilarious. But sometimes the comic relief becomes too much -- for example, when there are pages of it in the middle of an especially dramatic, intriguing section. Reading it for a second time, though, would probably fix this problem since the reader could take the time to enjoy the comedy. Other parts that tempt the reader to skip pages include long-winded, confusing accounts of business or financial dealings. However, these passages also show Franzen's breadth.

Franzen shows off impressive knowledge of biotechnology, culinary arts, businesses, finances, high-end clothes, physics, and rail lines. Just the research that all this must have taken is incredible.

The Corrections is 576 pages of voluptious, casual, rambling prose -- at times intriguing, frustrating, touching, and humorous. I recommend it.

Blankets, by Craig Thompson

Blankets is a semi-autobiographical graphic novel set in the Midwest that follows the story of a young man -- Craig -- through the traumas of childhood, the throes of first love, and the confusion that accompanies searching for his faith.

This huge graphic novel -- 592 pages -- is beautiful and complex. Craig is a believable, likeable character with intriguing thoughts. They're not witty, but insightful, as well as earnest, and sweet. The story itself is quiet, but paced very well: it's still a page turner.

Though Craig's interiority is the strength of the narrative, this is also where its main problem lies. After Craig's thoughts are transcribed for the whole of 500 pages, they're suddenly withheld at the climax. The result is that the reader feels distanced during the most emotionally intense, important part of the story. Writing interiority for an intense scene is hard even if the book is not semi-autobiographica; side-stepping it, however, was still authorial cheating.

Whether or not the interiority accompanies it, Thompson's animation is beautiful. It's clean and angular, looking like a black and white version of Disney's Hercules or Sleeping Beauty.

Blankets, despite its flaw, is a good read.