Novel ponders moral questions of life, death

All Things Literary

Eddie is 83 years old and — although he doesn’t know it — very close to death. So opens Mitch Albom’s "The Five People You Meet in Heaven." Having worked as a maintenance man at Ruby Point Amusement Park — think Coney Island — for all of his life, Eddie is a fixture at the park.

The first part of the novel concerns two threads — Eddie’s death and the melodramatic tragedy of Eddie’s life through his birthdays. The flashbacks to Eddie’s birthdays do not recount specific, important events in his life. Instead, Albom uses these milestones to track Eddie’s fortunes and misfortunes.

Then Eddie dies.

Albom follows Eddie to heaven which, strangely enough, looks just like Ruby Point Amusement Park. But this isn’t Eddie’s heaven — he’s just here to see someone. The maintenance man — now free of arthritic pain and his bum leg — strolls down the deserted boardwalk until his first meeting. As part of heaven, Eddie must meet five people who were part of his life. Through these five seemingly unconnected people, Eddie begins to grasp the meaning and far-reaching effect of his own life.

The novel is extraordinary not only in its originality, but in the fact that it avoids saccharine clichés.
Although in Eddie’s mind he has lived an unoriginal and uninspired life, the five people Eddie meets know differently — his presence had an extensive effect on everyone he met. One by one, the five reveal the mysteries of his supposedly meaningless life.

Heaven, Albom writes, is not a destination of eternal bliss — at least the part of it that Eddie sees isn’t. The heaven that Eddie encounters is far better than white fluffy clouds and choirs of angels, it is a place where one’s life is explained by the people one affected the most.

The novel is a classic-in-waiting, its moral revels in subtlety — don’t wait for heaven, embrace your five people now.