Words Of Paradise

By Lev Grossman/Boston

This is the strange but true story of how a failed jazz pianist from Passaic, N.J., became the author of one of the best-selling books in history. In 1997 Mitch Albom wrote a sad, funny account of his conversations with a dying man. Tuesdays with Morrie went on to sell more than 5.7 million copies in hardcover alone. It spent four straight years at the top of the New York Times best-seller list. Now the story is getting stranger: Albom has done it again, with a novel called The Five People You Meet in Heaven (Hyperion; 196 pages).

At least 5.7 million people--plus everybody who saw the TV movie or the off-Broadway play--already know the story of Morrie Schwartz, Albom's Brandeis professor who died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Albom, who gave up jazz to become a sportswriter, still seems a little shell-shocked by Morrie's success. Six years of having complete strangers come up to you and bare their souls will do that. "Before that whole experience," Albom says, "if I walked through an airport and somebody recognized me, they'd always say, 'Who's going to win the World Series? Who's going to win the Super Bowl?' And I would just keep walking--I would answer, but I would always keep walking. After Tuesdays with Morrie, people would recognize me, but they would say, 'I have to tell you something: my son just died of ALS.' Well, you can't keep walking anymore."

In person Albom is a small, intense guy with a large, handsome head; he bears a strong resemblance to a bobble-head doll. He has become the king of a certain highly potent brand of uplifting, inspirational wisdom--in the words of his friend the novelist Amy Tan, he is "the rabbi of everybody." Maybe it's an easy, sentimental kind of wisdom, but it is a kind for which there is an obvious, urgent, demonstrable need. And Albom does his best to live by it. He used the profits from Morrie to pay his professor's medical bills, and to this day he voluntarily splits the income from the book fifty-fifty with Morrie's family.

The hero of The Five People You Meet in Heaven is an 83-year-old amusement-park repairman named Eddie. Eddie is gruff and lonely and feels as if his life has been a waste. By the end of Chapter 1 Eddie is dead, having been killed trying to save a little girl from a runaway ride. We follow him into heaven. He doesn't meet Morrie there. Instead, he meets a guy with blue skin.

The blue guy worked at the amusement park too, in a freak show, and as a young boy Eddie inadvertently caused an auto accident that killed him. "There are five people you meet in heaven," the Blue Man explains. "Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth." His theme, and Albom's, is the interconnectedness of all our lives, and the impossibility of knowing the consequences of our actions in the grand scheme of things.

Five People is a harsher and maybe more honest book than Morrie. Morrie was about understanding life. Five People is about accepting the fact that true understanding is not the lot of the living. "Everybody walks around with a bunch of questions that aren't answered," Albom says, sounding genuinely upset about it. "And they never get the answers. They just go right through to the end of their life and never get 'em."

Five People is a powerful book, powerful enough to make one's inner snob feel a little uncomfortable, but in the end, it doesn't push back at you the way, say, Proust does: the truths it offers aren't difficult to understand or accept, and for all we know they may not even be true. They're just, in a profound way, what we want to hear, and there's solace in that, and solace isn't to be sneezed at. Albom is no Jonathan Franzen, but you don't see anybody grabbing Franzen around the knees at O'Hare. Pretty soon Albom will have to figure out what to do with some new royalties: Five People went back to press three times the first week it was on sale. Like Eddie, Albom has touched the lives of a lot of people he never even knew. If there is a heaven, he can expect to have around 5.7 million people waiting for him there.