Jeffrey Allen Mays

I thought of an analogy. Adolescence is like walking through a tunnel made of one-way mirrors. All you can see is yourself reflected on every wall, but meanwhile every one else is outside the tunnel watching you, awkward, only seeing yourself, lumbering through this lanky confused period to appear on the other end, relieved, sane, clear and thankful.

Such a conflicted time. But as a father of rapidly departing children, I think that the memories are the most painful part of life. While you are experiencing the picnics, the vacations on the beach, the nights playing basketball in the dark, the Christmas mornings, the days on a lake in a boat, the poverty, the struggling, the days before they all had cell phones—life was full and rich. And they are leaving the nest in rapid fire, just like they entered the nest, rapid fire, like little grenades into our family, changing everything, demanding much, but bringing incalculable happiness and meaning and beauty. What a life, and it’s not even over.

Compare the following props that might appear in a story:

• a pearl-handled straight razor
• an Egyptian broach
• a 1964 six-shooter pistol
• a bag of marijuana
• a faded polaroid photo of twin, pre-teen, strawberry blonde girls at a fishing trip cut in two with scissors, separating the twins

I was recently trying to come up with an idea for a story set in a realistic “here and now” context: with ordinary people, but without the use of any narrative device to make the setting surreal, dystopian, or magical as I like to use. And I realized any such realistic story would have to include people texting, using smartphones, using tablets or other new gadgetry. This is a problem.

Not because I’m a technophobe or Luddite. I own a smartphone. Tech gadgets could not be left out of a contemporary book because in the last 10 years tech gadgetry has become so ubiquitous that to leave them out would be a glaring omission; it would compromise the attempted realism, like leaving horses out of a western.

But to me, these props are so utterly clumsy and banal and fadish that they would be unusable in a serious writing effort. Of course, it’s all so new that there are not many books to refer to with people texting and looking stuff up on their new tablet. But if they did, I cannot imagine it being anything but clammy to the reader and cumbersome to the experience of reading the story.

Unless you’re writing the next Bridget Jones’s Diary. Then maybe. Or a satire conducted entirely in text messages. But I’m not talking about that kind of writing. Also remember, I’m not bashing gadgets. I’m only saying I do not believe they will work in good, serious fiction.

So what’s wrong with new tech? My hypothesis is that new tech has no story-ness about it, no sex appeal, no history, no cultural cachet. Also, the current national narrative about social media and hot new electronic gadgetry is that it is killing relationships, stifling conversations, turning kids into transfixed, sedentary addicted lumps. Much of the commentary about Facebook is that it substitutes real communication, authentic feelings and true community for an ersatz, pithy, sloganeering, avatar-ized, bogus circle of unheard, mostly unseen “friends.”

In my opinion, the appearance of the newest Samsung tablet with HD whatever is not merely hopelessly unliterary, but damning, an instant bomb. From my perspective, new tech in fiction is unwritable. I’m sure some writers attempt it—books to read on the beach, YA fiction, chic lit (although YA usually happens in an imaginary place where the absence of tech is not a problem: Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Twilight).

And maybe some people like that story-set-in-MY-world feel. I don’t. There needs to be some distance, some escape from my boring world. I cannot imagine Cormac McCarthy doing it. Who wants to read a book about their own life and setting? You get that every day!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OINa46HeWg8&w=420&h=315]

I saw Blue Like Jazz recently, and although I liked some aspects of the movie (the actors, some of the characters, parts of the plot), and while I admired its attempt to break out of the strict verbal and behavioral codes mandated by … Oh, wait, stop! Were you even aware there was a massive corporate media industry behind the flood of Evangelical films lately? I wasn’t either. Call it Holywood.

And yes, there are simply some things that Holywood will not put into celluloid. Gossip is fine, greed is fine, gluttony is…well, not sure that’s even a sin. Kissing is allowed if it is between consenting, attractive married couples. But dirty language? A sympathetic lesbian? An unhappy ending!? No way. Holywood aggressively tried to sink the film before it ever came out for crossing these lines.

But I digress. I just started and I’m already digressing.

Most evangelical-produced media is failing these days. (“Fail” as measured not on a monetary but an artistic scale.) This has been going on for a while now and many have been talking about it. BLJ is not the worst example by far, but in the end it succumbs to particularly evangelical weaknesses. Here are some reasons why many attempts at storytelling are failing.

1. Bad Craftsmanship. One reason is that the dialog and acting are frequently very bad. The plots are predictable and repetitive. The characters are plastic. The conflicts are little more than cleaned-up Sunday School problems. All questions have answers…in the Bible (chapter and verse provided). The soundtrack is made of thumping contemporary worship music which only Evangelicals like. The motivational soliloquies are thinly veiled sermons. Precious Moments, Thomas Kincade sentimentality. Lovers of good stories know this is bad art.
2. Evangelicalism is an Unappealing, Foreign Culture. The second reason is that they feature evangelicals doing evangelical stuff, saying evangelical things. And evangelicals simply do not play well on the written page or on the screen. The various postures and insider vocabulary, raising hands and earnest group prayer sessions – only Evangelicals who like to watch movies about people just like themselves might appreciate this. But they are the hokey, somewhat familiar idiosyncrasies of the Religious Right to every one else.
3. One Dimensional Faith. But the biggest problem is that Evangelical fiction, books or movies or whatever, usually have only one thing to say, one message, one commentary for the world: Becoming A Christian Is The Solution To All Your Problems. Their story-telling fails because  they only have one story to tell. A guy or girl or family has problems, they get right with God, and the narrative resolves. Flannery O’Connor didn’t do this, nor Walker Percy, Graham Greene, T.S. Eliot, or many others. BLJ fails mostly on this point.

Interestingly, these things are not true for Catholic-based films. Consider the tough-talking, cigarette-smoking priests in Clint Eastwood movies like Gran Torino, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby. And another excellent Catholic film, Doubt. Black Gospel churchgoers fare pretty well (cf. Blues Brothers, Ladykillers), Sister Act notwithstanding. And movies about religious people insane or over-the-top can occasionally be good (cf. The Apostle, There Will Be Blood, Bernie).

But put an earnest good-looking evangelical in a movie and you have an instant schmaltz fest, even if they are pushing the boundaries of cool, sexual temptation, profanity, substance abuse struggling with doubts or whatever.

Full disclosure. I did not read the book. I saw the movie, along with two or three other movie trailers on the DVD that were painful to watch. Movies like the one where the Christian football team has troubles, until they really turn their lives over to Jesus.

Or the one with the fireman who has marriage troubles and can only love his wife well if he becomes a Christian. Or the one where the upper-class family has financial troubles until they turn their home budget over to Jesus. Or the Left Behind movie, soon to be remade staring the former actor known as Nicholas Cage.

Blue Like Jazz had a lot of edgy material: a college freshman rejecting his church background, his mother pregnant by the youth pastor(!) in his smarmy home church, abundant drug and alcohol use, profanity, a lesbian main character portrayed in a somewhat sympathetic light, women using the men’s restroom. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria! Or at least, campus-wide hysteria.

Still, when it was all over, the main character is won over by the beautiful, blonde authentically Christian girl, and he is confessing his sins and obliquely discovering a hip new way to be a believer.

There are some good films being made by people who are either Christian or who speak the language better than Christians do: Wim Wenders, Terrence Malik, Paul Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, Krzysztof Kieslowski and possibly Jill Sprecher (13 Conversations). These directors do not offer easy answers to hard questions.

Nor do they feel obliged to have happy endings, sorta like real life.

Nor, as in real life, are good and evil always easily distinguishable.

Nor are the characters always either good-looking young Anglo couples, or wise, heavyset, sassy Black women, or gruff, flannel-shirted, estranged fathers, or prescient blond children.

Nor do they have drug lords, infantry soldiers, pirates or stocky biker gangs saying things like “I’ll beat the heck out of you, gosh darn it.”

This is one of those occasions where “the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.” (Luke 16:8)

1981. My 9th grade English class. The assignment was Great Expectations.

It was a time when reading and literature was my enemy. Books were stuffy old furniture. Reading conflicted with my life goal of being a slacker. It threatened to tame the animal nature that was serving me quite well, thank you.

I remember this about my youth, that I did not know I was ignorant. I did not know I was missing out on anything. It was not intentionally thumbing my nose at intelligence, because I did not know any better. In the beastly nature of my youth, I did not have the adult perspective that I have now to look at myself and think, “You animal! Rise up out of the dust and use the brain God gave you.”

And reading required effort.

And it necessarily meant interrupting me from other things I would rather be doing.

What a difference 30 years makes.

Parents, I hope you will take heart from my story. It wasn’t until my mid twenties that I began to read any serious literature. I think I started with The Brothers Karamzov. It was a tough start.

From my 9th grade class, I only remember the scene where Pip is meeting Estella and Miss Havisham for the first time, in the dusty, cobwebby old house sitting there around the decrepit wedding cake. I doubt if I actually read much of the book then.

Now my book club, The Austin Athenaeum, is reading GE for its December meeting. I’ve barely started (I’m in chapter 4) but what a fantastic book! I have not laughed out loud at a book in a long time.

It reminds me of P. G. Wodehouse or G. K. Chesterton. The British humor is so delightful. It is not the absurd humor like Monty Python, but in those opening chapters where we are learning about Pip’s every day life living with his sister and her husband, his poverty and difficulties, which is other books are fairly heavy and black, in this book are side-splittingly funny.

I know the book goes on to more serious and dramatic themes, but so far it has been a page turner.