Here are little books full of big advice, each dedicated to the idea that you can learn an awful lot from a gruff old guy named Eddie. John Grisham's Bleachers revolves around coach Eddie Rake, who has taught a small town's high school athletes practically everything they know.
Meanwhile Mitch Albom, author of Tuesdays With Morrie, reworks It's a Wonderful Life to include an Eddie inspired by his own uncle. Get out your handkerchiefs as this Eddie takes a Technicolor, special-effects-filled trip to the Great Beyond and realizes how different the world would have been without him.
Each Eddie is at death's door as his best-selling inspirational story begins. In The Five People You Meet in Heaven,Albom ticks off the last minutes of his character's life. His Eddie works at an amusement park and will sacrifice his life to save a little girl on a runaway ride. Eddie's journey after his demise is manipulatively but touchingly geared to readers seeking consolation in a post-9/11 world.
The prospect of having Eddie's life flash before his eyes is not nearly dynamic enough for Albom. So, "A sudden wind lifted Eddie, and he spun like a pocket watch on the end of a chain. An explosion of smoke engulfed him, swallowing his body in a flume of colors. The sky seemed to pull in, until he could feel it touching his skin like a gathered blanket. Then it shot away and exploded into jade. Stars appeared, millions of stars, like salt sprinkled across the greenish firmament." Though Eddie has reached heaven by now, it sounds more like he's gone to the movies.
Nobody ever went broke by describing heaven's amenities. A current book called A Travel Guide to Heaven is even crass enough to envision it as a five-star resort run by God and stocked with dead celebrities. ("How would you like to discuss literature with Jane Austen, or have Albert Einstein personally explain to you the workings of the universe?") But Albom's idea of spirituality is more sincere, give or take the odd picturesque parlor trick. Speaking of tricks, one of the five people of the title is a man whose skin is blue.
"Strangers are just family you have not yet come to know," the Blue Man reveals to Eddie. (He also reveals that drinking a nightly dose of silver nitrate can effect one's complexion.) And another incontrovertible pearl, "No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone."
The Five People You Meet in Heaven can be reduced to a string of such reassuring verities and a list of who Eddie's five people turn out to be. (Handkerchief hint: One of them is his dead wife, young and beautiful again, with Judy Garland's rendition of You Made Me Love You playing as background music.) But that would do an injustice to a book with the genuine power to stir and comfort its readers. Albom describes the point of this book as wishing to make people like "my uncle, and others like him -- people who felt unimportant here on Earth -- realize, finally, how much they mattered and how much they were loved."
Grisham's Bleachers summons more of a love-hate situation. Coach Eddie Rake was so tough on his athletes that the whole little town of Messina found him a polarizing presence. As the coach's best quarterback, the high school All-American Neely Crenshaw, returns to Messina on the eve of Rake's death, Grisham kicks up all the pride, regret, memorabilia and hard-won wisdom generally associated with the phrase "glory days."
Grisham's stories -- even the short, anomalous ones like his last small book, Skipping Christmas -- generally have more storytelling force than Bleachers does. His purpose this time seems more reflective than showy, and his love for this sports-related subject matter is palpably real. And so, in a book suffused with bittersweet nostalgia, Grisham has Neely look back on the days when Rake was the center of his universe. Long before there was a name for it, Rake knew how to dole out tough love.
As the book exposes the myths and exaggerations that grew up around Messina's championship times, and around Neely himself, it builds up to a remarkable reunion sequence. There, in the bleachers of the title, is a collection of former athletes, all ready to listen to a re-creation of a pivotal 1987 game. To Grisham's credit he makes this football game so real that the reader can almost see and hear it.
Bleachers has a hidden revelation about Rake to deliver, but it concentrates mostly on a eulogy for him. "Once you've played for Eddie Rake, you carry him with you forever," Neely finally acknowledges. "You hear his voice, you see his face, you long for his smile of approval, you remember his tongue-lashings." The coach is dead by this point, but in a book like this or Albom's there is always room for a message from beyond the grave.
"I've loved five people in my life," Neely finally says, as he counts Rake among them. Five people -- again? Why five? Whatever the answer, Grisham and Albom have made five a very popular number.
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