GHASTLY: SBucks Cues Up Depressing Book
Have you been feeling a bit manic because of the amount of caffeine that you consume?
You say you have?! Great!
Starbucks now sells a cure to go balance out the caffeine high. It's a book called For One More Day...
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Beginning Tuesday, participating Starbucks stores will sell not only lattes and pumpkin cookies but also the Mitch Albom novel For One More Day.
The pairing of the coffee goliath with a publishing goliath (the two previous Albom books, the memoir Tuesdays With Morrie and the novel The Five People You Meet in Heaven, have sold 11 million and 8 million copies) is fitting: For One More Day, already available in bookstores, could be read during the average coffee break.
With short, schmaltzy reads the trademark of the Albom franchise, For One More Day (only 5 by 7.5 inches) stretches a modest 197 pages.
The plot is simple: Charley "Chick" Bennetto, who has lived to please his father (usually unsuccessfully) and take his mother for granted, goes into a tailspin, drinking, after his mother dies.
He loses his job and family; when his daughter gets married, he isn’t even invited to the wedding.
Charley decides to commit suicide.
At that point, the story — a cross between Field of Dreams and It’s a Wonderful Life — turns positively ghostly.
Charley, choosing to return home to Pepperville Beach (aka Anytown, USA) to do himself in, just about manages the deed before entering his old house to find his neglected mother, dead for almost a decade, up and about.
Albom — a Detroit Free Press columnist and a former sportswriter — uses short, common words in simple declarative sentences.
Describing his parents, Charley says: "My mother was French Protestant, and my father was Italian Catholic, and their union was an excess of God, guilt, and sauce."
They argued, he explains, about almost everything.
"My father would hang a picture of Jesus on the wall outside the bathroom and, while he was at work, my mother would move it somewhere less conspicuous. He would come home and yell, ‘You can’t move Jesus, for Christ’s sake!’ and she would say, ‘It’s a picture, Len. You think God wants to hang by the bathroom?’
"And he would put it back.
"And the next day she would move it.
"On and on like that."
For One More Day moves at a breezy pace, leavened by jocularity, toward an inevitable litany of deep messages.
One senses the messages long before they arrive, and so, when they finally do, they somehow seem comforting.
"When someone is in your heart," Charley’s mom reassures him, "they’re never truly gone. They can come back to you, even at unlikely times."
As the novel flies toward its conclusion, Charley becomes buried under the cliches.
He has a pair of dramatic realizations over a couple of pages near the end: that "Your mother and father pass through you to your children, like it or not"; and "When you look at your mother, you are looking at the purest love you will ever know."
For One More Day is reminiscent of the Harry Chapin song Cat’s in the Cradle, only slightly longer and much more obvious.
beichenberger@dispatch.comtechnorati tags:coffee, shop, house, starbucks, barista, franchise
posted by Admin at 7:48 PM
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