(Published by Little Brown)
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When Carlo Wolff opened his review of The Five People You Meet in Heaven with the words “How many ways can you define ‘superficial’?” he had no idea what he started. You see, Wolff was a freelance journalist commissioned to review the book. As you can tell from his opener, he didn’t like it but then everyone’s entitled to their opinion, aren’t they? Well no actually, because the review was for The Detroit Free Press – where Mitch Albom is a sports columnist. The review was edited and was to appear in a more anodyne form in the paper. After some editorial kerfuffle, the unflattering review was pulled and never appeared in the paper. A statement was later released saying that the Detroit Free Press had a policy of not reviewing books by staff. Or in reality, not giving bad reviews to books by staff.
Is it really that bad a book? Well yes it is. Think of every life-after-death/ immortality/life philosophy cliché ever written and it’s got ’em all tenfold. Now that might be ok if they were cleverly utilised or if the book was well written – but it’s not. Mitch Albom is a master of unoriginality.
So what happens? We meet Eddie, an elderly fairground worker, who is perennially grouchy. The opening pages countdown to the last minutes of Eddie’s Life. Albom bumps him off before the page numbers hit double figures and we’re off on his celestial tour of afterlife banalities. The premise is that five people explain your life on earth to you in heaven – but shock horror – they’re not the five that you expect. But in a way they are, and after we meet The Blue Man, I really wasn’t interested in who the other four were. The book alternates between the next four people and Eddie’s past birthdays. So little did the actual plot impact on me that this was a blur of leaden dialogue and stating-the-bleeding-obvious. The ‘twists’ were so predictable I started to wonder if I was slightly psychic. Albom even resorts to revealing ‘important’ information on the very last line of a chapter. C’mon!
Eddie is quite a detestable character and this lessens any emotional impact Albom is aiming for. He tries to paint a picture of a man who’s had a tough life but he only comes off as a child-hating moaner who constantly feels sorry for himself. Not content with making it to heaven, he whinges his way around it for the entire book (the ultimate eternal grouch!)
I don’t have a heart of stone and I’m less cynical now than I ever was, but this book’s patronising pseudo-spirituality is an insult to anyone’s intelligence. We all have our views on the afterlife and this book makes a laugh of all of them all. The way Mitch Albom articulates important emotions is twee and saccharine. Albom does what Paulo Coelho does best – writing self-help books and disguising them as fiction to sell to people who wouldn’t dare buy a self-help book.
So at least I know I’m not the only person to give this book a bad review. Five reasons not to read this book? There. Are. Just. Too. Many.
The DJ 
Also by Mitch Albom
Tuesdays with Morrie
Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho
