Book Review: Night of the Living Dead Christian, Part 3

[I don’t actually think there will be spoilers here.  But who the hell knows?  Be prepared, kiddos.  Actually, upon further consideration, yes, there are spoilers.  But y’know what?  While I find that I’m not overly fond of the book itself, I’ve developed a great deal of respect for its author over the course of the day.  So, um, as weird as this might sound, I think you should seriously consider buying the book anyway, even if you don’t end up reading it.  Even if you end up giving money to Tyndale House, you’d also be voting with your dollars to tell them to support authors who are thoughtful, willing to respectfully engage people who have taken it upon themselves to say some rather unkind things about their books and who are trying to not be the Christian fiction authors of ten years ago when I was surrounded by the wasteland of Christian publishing.  Also, that may well be the most backhanded compliment I’ve ever given anyone.]

Back at the old digs I had a series on the book Wild at Heart.  The posts are still around, but for some reason when I tried (unsuccessfully, natch) to port all the old posts over to Typepad the posts there got messed up.  So you can go try and read them, but they’re kinda wall-o-text-ish these days.

Anyway, for those who don’t know, Wild at Heart is a book about reclaiming Biblical manhood by John Eldredge.  I loved the book, back in the day.  I was actually surprised, then, when I mentioned to Her[1] that it was one of my favorite book and she was shocked.  She told me (paraphrased), “All the guys I know who say that they like that book don’t actually know how to treat women.”

I found that fascinating and went back and re-read the book, trying to understand why.   What I realized was that there was an awful lot in that book that could easily be taken as support of the standard patriarchal system with women as lesser beings.  Moreover, there was a general attitude that men were the ones who went off to adventure and the prime position of a woman was in the background, supporting and cheering her man on.

I’d missed that the first couple times around because I didn’t believe that was the role of women.  I didn’t much care what the Bible said about such things, I saw women as equal and, in some cases, more-than-equal.  It kinda depended on the woman in question, really.

As I moved completely away from Christianity I went back to Wild at Heart and found that the book was a very different book than I’d thought.  All of the subtle misogyny I’d glossed over leapt off the page and forced me to pay attention.  That was why I wrote the Wild at Heart posts on the old blog.  I pulled from other sources, I challenged that book I’d once loved.  I found it wanting or lacking in just about every way.

There’s another thread that anyone who has been following this blog for a few years would also know.  When I left the church I discovered storytelling.  I traded sermons for stories, as I’ve said in the past.  The story was, when I discovered it, an instrument of freedom that left the audience free to discover their own meaning and morals and lessons.

I realized, though, that there is a danger to the story.  For every story comes with an intended lesson.  Without that lesson the story really doesn’t have any reason to exist, after all.  But every story is a product of its background.  With the old tales this is obvious, since the past is a foreign country, wherein they do things differently.

One of the things I realized was that in a lot of the old stories there was a very dangerous secondary lesson in re: women.  Think through the old stereotypes.  There’s the knight in shining armor who rescues the damsel in distress.  Whatever the main moral of the story, the secondary lesson is that it’s the man’s role to rescue and the woman’s role to be rescued.

The descriptions, too, are often telling.  The male hero is usually lauded for his bravery and courage and strength.  The female hero is usually lauded for her beauty and beauty and beauty.[2]  This, ultimately, is something I find extremely frustrating, mostly because one of the most human responses of all is to say, “This is how things have been, so it must be the way they should be.”

In Christian circles (and Muslim circles, really, but I’m not talking about Muslim literature here) this is known as “complementarianism.”  It goes back to that whole Genesis thing where god made Adam in the Garden of Eden, then said, “Hey, it sucks to be that guy, I should make him a helper,” so god made Eve.  The specific Genesis passage doesn’t actually have to be taken as a misogynistic explanation and codification of gender roles, as there are plenty of easy ways to interpret the idea of “companion to help him do stuff” can be regarded as a positive for everyone involved.

That’s not what it’s been taken to traditionally mean, however.  Women have, with few exceptions, been treated as second-class citizens throughout the history of civilization.  It’s something that happens even if the Bible isn’t involved.  Greek and Roman society, for instance, was hardly egalitarian.

In fact, egalitarianism can happen in spite of the Bible.  Several of the de facto leaders of the Byzantine Empire, one of the most Christian of all empires, were women.  They had to be somewhat creative in how they led, but their levels of power were scandalous as far as the rest of Europe was concerned.  The point there is that nothing is black and white.  Even where the Bible is concerned.

We do not live in the Byzantine Empire, however.  We live in the 21st Century.  We are heirs to the feminist movement, which I see as an almost 100% good as far as the history of humanity is concerned[3].  We are also the heirs to the counter-feminists, a movement spearheaded, like so many other shameful movements throughout history, by those who could be referred to in the shorthand as “conservative Christians.”  This is not intended as an indictment of all conservatives, nor of all Christians.  It’s just that in Western society the people most likely to say, “We have to do it this way because we’ve always done it this way,” are waving Bibles around for all to see.

“Complementarianism” is a convenient fifth column for those who want to repress women using the Bible as justification.  It relies on a whole shitload of prooftexting to say, “Hey, look, god wants women to hang back and, y’know, cook and stuff.  And that’s totally okay because it’s what women were made to do.  By god!”

Books like Wild at Heart serve a purpose (even if unintended by the author) of supporting that particular attitude.  They push the, “Men go out and have adventures,” meme by pushing an idea of “Biblical manhood,” that basically says, “Men go out and fight stuff.”  In the Bible, of course, women don’t go out and fight stuff.  As long as we ignore Deborah.  Or Jael.  Or we give them lip service, but then say that they did what they did because the men had temporarily failed at their duty.[4]

So, then, with regards to the subject at hand…

One of the consistent problems throughout Night of the Living Dead Christian is the lack of female perspective characters.  This is compounded by the fact that the female characters, in general, play secondary roles.  The main good characters basically leave their wives behind.

Now, I understand that there was a driving point in the book that could basically be summed up as, “Don’t ignore your familial obligations whilst going out on your great adventures.”  This is actually a good lesson and can, in many ways, be taken as a contradiction of that very Wild at Heart mentality I just spent two pages lambasting.

Part of the reason that I spent the first half of Night of the Living Dead Christian giving the book the benefit of the doubt was that I saw that as one of the points the book was attempting to make.  Mikalatos-as-narrator did basically set himself up as an unreliable narrator.  Assuming that was intentional, it was actually outside the scope of what I was expecting to see.  There’s a lot of earnestness in Christian fiction, after all.  Also, too, the way Mikalatos-as-author set Mikalatos-as-narrator up was pretty damned Gary Stu-ish.[5]

On some level, though, the Gary Stu nature of Mikalatos-as-narrator got in the way of the unreliable narrator nature of Mikalatos-as-narrator.  Geds-as-reader tended to downplay the unreliable narrator angle in favor of the Gary Stu angle.  Geds-as-book-reviewer realizes that this might not have been correct.[6]

There are two pivot points for this balance of potential misogyny: the treatment of Lara and the treatment of Clarissa (Luther’s wife.  I might not have name-checked her in part 2).  Actually, there’s kind of a third: the bit where zombie-guy-whose-name-I’ve-totally-forgotten says he’s going to marry a woman named Krista and then just kinda drops the subject half a page later.  What becomes of poor other-Krista?  Doesn’t she have any thoughts about this?

Hmm, that really should have been a footnote.  Ah, well.

Anyway, I interpreted Lara’s story as being an attempt to create sympathy for Luther.  I didn’t really see her pain and abuse as being properly treated, and the sort of blithe explanation that she was a vampire because of what she did in response to her story seemed extremely reductionist and, well, rather cold hearted.  Everything that came before and after was colored by that perception.

Similarly, I don’t think that Clarissa’s motivations were really given enough thought, specifically from Mikalatos-as-narrator.  And this is where the issue gets really thorny.  I understand that Mikalatos-as-narrator was, fundmentally, an unreliable narrator who didn’t know as much as Mikalatos-as-author (which, to give all due respect, is a really hard thing to do, especially if the narrator is supposed to be something less than omniscient).  What ultimately bugged me was that Mikalatos-as-narrator didn’t seem to give a shit about Clarissa’s motivations.

The night before he’d witnessed Luther go in to a rage and attempt to kill his wife and nearly gotten killed in the process.  Mikalatos-as-narrator’s basic response was, “Yeah, Luther probably deserved the mean things she said, but now I want to talk to Luther about freedom in Jesus.”  It was extremely dismissive in a way that was jarring.  Or, rather, it would have been jarring in another book.  By that point all the goodwill I’d been building up had been tossed out the window because I’d gone from, “Here’s a guy who’s trying to break out of the stereotypical Christian thing,” to, “Ah, crap, it’s another poorly disguised evangelical sales pitch.”  In fact, I sent a buddy a text that said, “Wow.  The salvation pitch can really derail a decent book,” when I hit Lara’s explanation of what a vampire was.

And it’s now eleven thirty here in the Holy Land West and I haven’t even hit on my other two big complaints.  I think I’m looking at a five-parter.

Or a six-parter.  Hell, seven or eight.  That’s just how I roll here in Gedsmoland…

---------------------------

[1]Um, wow.  Since I know that there’s at least one person reading now who doesn’t know, I figure that I should give a quick re-cap: there is an individual I refer to as “Her” ‘round these here parts.  She was someone with whom I was kinda-sorta pretty much in love back a few years ago who was also a Baptist pastor’s daughter and very much daddy’s little princess, which made the fact that I was in the process of leaving Christianity at the time very difficult for everyone involved.  I spent a bunch of time in late 2008 and 2009 using her as a sort of stand-in for my now-absent faith and also lamenting the fact that it didn’t work out.

The last couple places she appeared in a post were here and here, though.  Things have changed a bit lately.

[2]There are notable exceptions, though, specifically the beauty and the beast tales or their close Eastern European cousin the Hedgehog Prince.  In that the man is an uncouth, wild creature who is saved by the love of a woman whose chief quality is loyalty and the ability to see beyond the physical.  That, too, has a parallel in the old Arthurian tale of Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady, in which the noble knight marries a terribly ugly woman, but then finds out that she is an accursed princess and the curse cannot be broken by a kiss, but by giving her the right to choose her own destiny.

It’s rather on the nose, really…

Also, too, there are other examples in traditional story.  Off the top of my head there are stories that I shorthand as “Clever Gretel” tales after the Brothers Grimm tale.  Basically, though, they’re Trickster (or, more appropriately, Jack) tales with a female lead.  There are also a few archetypical female heroes, like Atalanta.

By and large, however, the role of men in traditional stories is to go and do.  The role of women is to wait loyally.  That is not a particularly great division of labor.

[3]I say “almost 100%” because there’s always someone, somewhere, who fucks something up.  It’s simply impossible for something to be 100% or 0% good or bad.  In aggregate, though, the social equality movements of the 20th Century made the world a better place, no questions asked.

[4]Yeah, I have actually seen that argument.  Off the top of my head I can’t tell you where.  But it pops up from time to time.

[5]I have a hard time seeing it as not-Gary-Stu, since Mikalatos-as-narrator bumbles through a lot of stuff, has an epiphany about his own comparatively-minor-but-similar-to-the-other-characters flaws, then ultimately saves the day.  That’s kinda-sorta the very definition of Mary Sueism.  With the caveat that Mikalatos-as-author did try to retain a sense of Mikalatos-as-narrator being really super confused about everything, when the truly traditional Mary Sue/Gary Stu is the only one who knows what’s what.

[6]Geds-as-footnote-writer, meanwhile, is trying to figure out how to fix his vanilla-pumpkin-granola yogurt concoction.  “Not eating it while drinking Dogfish Head World Wide Stout” is probably a good first step for next time.

Comments

[Matt Mikalatos]

Hey, Geds, sorry I've had a busy day and am just now getting back to commenting.

First of all... backhanded compliment accepted! I take them however they come. Thanks for the kind words and for encouraging people to buy a book you hate. That's pretty classy.

Second, it might be helpful for me as someone who doesn't know you to hear your definition of misogyny versus sexism. Some of the things you mention I would say are sexist (examples from Wild at Heart being excellent ones), but sexism can come from motivations and issues other than misogyny. I don't see the words as interchangeable, and I wonder if we're functioning with different definitions.

And, since we're talking about definitions, I'll just throw out that I find Ged-as-reader's definition of a Gary-Stu character to be a bit broad. I mean, if that's the basic definition, then Inspector Cleuseau or Tweety Bird or Ferris Bueller fall into the definition pretty easily. In fact, you could probably just say "protagonist in a comedy" and be hitting it pretty close. The wish-fulfillment aspect seems like a key one, and, yes, I don't think the term is particularly helpful outside of fan fiction. Also, if Mikalatos-as-narrator were wish fulfillment I would have made him a lot smarter.

On the Wild at Heart topic, I'll just mention that all of the men on the "quest" in my novel are idiots, at least one of them (Mikalatos) is a coward. And I point out that the only person who has any real abilities in a fight is Lara. Mikalatos gets cornered by zombies, bitten by them, thrown through a plate glass window, caught in his own werewolf trap, caught by a werewolf (twice) and captured by zombies in his own front yard (also twice, and both times due to his own ineptitude).

The unreliability of the narrator came primarily from his unawareness of himself and the fact that he's a bit of a moron (with rare moments of clarity). His brain weather is probably rainy with occasional sunbreaks.

Okay, the real issue here, though, and the place where we have a definite disagreement is the question of the treatment of Lara and Clarissa (and other-Krista, which I'll give you because, honestly, she's mentioned in one sentence and purely as a joke, so, no, she wasn't treated as a human being). I understand what Ged-as-reader is saying, but I don't think the text supports his conclusions.

Starting with Lara:

There are only two characters in this book that approach three dimensional, and they are Luther (the werewolf) and Lara (the vampire). I don't see an issue here (of course not, because I'm the author), because this is satire/farce, and broad characterizations and plot-driven cardboard cutouts characters are somewhat the norm. I do think, however, that the fact that Lara is one of the (two!) more fully realized characters is to treat her with dignity and respect as a person. I don't think the text supports the idea that she exists only to create sympathy for Luther, partly because I think hearing Lara's story of abuse brings the severity of Luther's transgression into sharper focus, and also because her story continues beyond Luther's. Once Luther's story is mostly complete, we return to Lara and talk about the aftermath of what she shared earlier, her despair of moving beyond where she is, and talk about hope for her future. Lara is clearly the most intelligent person in the book, and she points the way forward for Luther (regardless of whether you like where she points him). She functions as a wise advisor on the path, and Luther's choice to stray from that direction only causes him trouble along the way. Regarding the idea that Lara could become abusive in some way (this is left to the reader... not spelled out in detail) as a result of her own abuse... the fact is that this happens sometimes, but by the time we hear from Lara that is something from her past that she has moved beyond. She saw what she was becoming and took steps to remove it from her life. Unlike her husband, she reversed direction and overcame it. Certainly I could have chosen to make her pure victim, but in a book that is about the hope of transformation, it seemed that it would be a disservice to those who have been abused and found themselves trapped in a cycle of violence or anger or abuse themselves.

I should mention, actually, that one thing you are hitting on that is definitely an issue is the limitation of the metaphor being employed here. If vampires "become" vampires, and werewolves "just are" that way (which isn't really explicitly spelled out that I recall) and zombies are "infected" by other zombies, then what does that say about the nature of human monstrosity. Is Lara a monster because she is a victim? Here I can only say that the metaphor breaks down. It's not a book about origins of monstrosity, and the metaphor doesn't sufficiently address that. There are clues throughout the book that origin is not being addressed or really considered (for instance, Mikalatos wondering what sort of monster his newborn child will be). Throughout the book the story is that "we" are the monsters, even those who don't think they are.

Regarding Clarissa... three things. One related to the narrator and one to writing and one to the character.

One: Yes, Mikalatos-as-narrator (as has already been mentioned) is an idiot. He's an "out of sight out of mind" sort of person (as is evidenced in the way he treats his family and the fact that he never even realized that Lara was a vampire despite large, obvious clues). His concern is focused on Luther, so he ignores Clarissa. He's a bit of a bastard in this regard (Aha! Another strike against the Gary-Stu theory) although Clarissa sees him as earnest enough that she call him later to deliver a message to Luther. But narrator-as-idiotic-jerk doesn't equal misogynistic book.

Second, as a writer, here I have a protagonist (Luther) who is emotionally cold, arrogant and a wife beater. And I need to make the audience care about him. The more attention I gave Clarissa (and Luther does talk some about her excellent qualities, which as I recall were not "beauty beauty beauty"), the easier it was for the emotional weight and attention of the book to fall toward Clarissa... which wouldn't be a bad thing, but that's not the story I was telling. "There is hope even for the most monstrous among us" wouldn't really be the direction we were headed in Clarissa's story. So, all that to say... I probably could have done this if I were a better writer, but as of now it's outside my skill level. Actually, I had to pull things back with Lara as well, because she easily could have become the center of the novel.

Three, you mentioned (in part 1) that Clarissa came off as a bitch because she stormed in and belittled Luther's manhood and suggested he kill himself. I think her response was reasonable given Luther's own admissions, and I think the audience needed to be given permission to hate him as well as hope he would be, ultimately, triumphant (personally, not in relationship to Clarissa). I thought, though, that the scene where she serves Luther the divorce papers really makes that a hard interpretation to stick to. She showed real compassion toward him (more than he deserved), while still doing what was best for her daughter and herself in the midst of it.

Whew. Lastly... evangelical sales pitch. Well. You're reading a book about spiritual transformation by a Christian. Sucker! You totally fell for it! Moowhahahahaaaa! Yeah, I can only say that my worldview is that the presence of Christ in someone's life is a key part of spiritual transformation, so it's going to come up. I'll at least point out that what you get here is a straight out "be a person like Jesus" thing, not a "say this prayer and you're good" thing. Ah, refreshing. :)

Alright... the baby is now asleep and I have sitcoms to watch and, you know, the whole world to convert and everything. I better get back to it. Looking forward to your thoughts and the next 12 parts in the series.

[Geds]

Wow...that's a lot of text. I'm starting to feel like I should just have you write guest posts called, "Geds Review: How He's Missing the Point, Part N."

Actually, though, I'm realizing that I did this in the wrong order. A lot of what I'm seeing up there is the sort of thing that putting the "what I think the book did right" post first would have solved. I might have to switch things up. But I had a short interlude last night and am still engaged in the Great House "Purchasing" Fiasco of 2011, so I'm a skosh scatterbrained.

[Matt Mikalatos]

Yeah. That was a long one. Next time I'll try to take the Coldplay fans' route and just do a drive by anonymous comment about how wrong you are for having an opinion. :)

[Michael Mock]

...And on the strength of that comment, I just bought a copy of your book, Mr. Mikalatos. Also, it's a good thing I wasn't drinking anything when I read that.

[Geds]

Well this has taken an unexpected turn.

Note to self: become a publicist.

[kamagra]

Vampires are the opposite of what Christ is all about.