Kirsten Mustain, Author

Sunshine and warmth has finally flooded the verdant bluff I call Dragonback after a chill and rainy spring.

The flowers are blooming in profusion, and it is all I can do to keep the weeds from overtaking everything.

Yesterday I rode to Joplin with my mother to visit the health food store and stock up on seaweed.

As we were making our way back through Seneca, Mo., a picturesque little town with lovely neat houses and brightly flowered yards, she told me that she was having trouble getting though a novel she was reading because the author seemed to mistake triteness for depth.

It is a common literary failing, these days, for authors (many of them in the MFA crowd, I'm sorry to say) to toss in a few heart-warming clichés with cursory observations of "real life" and present the resulting piece as some sort of spiritual revelation.

I try to forbear, but sometimes I become annoyed at these literary authors who think they have discovered some real deep truth and imagine that they can, in well-modulated tones complete with clever turns of phrase, enlighten their spiritually impoverished readers.

As an example, my friend JB and I attended a literary conference at which he was presenting a reading several years ago and we happened to attend the reading of a young author who was all the rage among the literary set at the time. This author, who had perfected the preferred literary reading tone – the calm voice . . .  the . . . pregnant pause . . . the . . . measured . . . enunciation – read a story in which a man buys a trench coat at a second-hand store. The trench coat turns out to be God's trench coat, and the pockets are constantly filling with small bits of paper that have people's prayers on them. The man is eventually overwhelmed and we are left to presume that God had also been overwhelmed by the sadness and feckless pleadings of humanity and finally sold his trench coat on consignment.  I guess.

It is a singular sort of self-involvedness, I believe, that enables a person to anthropomorphosize God to such an extent that the Universal Creative Force becomes a man in a trench coat who can't cope with people's prayers.

Perhaps the story is so deep that I just couldn't fathom it.

However, I am always suspicious of anyone who thinks they can expose deep truths by explaining them in obvious terms as if to a fool.

Rather than read in well-modulated tones, this author might have screamed, "Hey, you idiots, life is hopeless and God is weak!" Would it have been any less edifying?

Depth is never so obvious or easy to arrive at. Hence the word "depth" as opposed to "shallowness" – the cliché you may see on the surface.

Furthermore, I think the purpose of stories is not to preach or to blatantly spell out what the author believes is revelation.

Deep truths are ever subtle. They are buried quite far down, after all.

A good story should help the reader discover the truth within. It should unfold and allow each reader to find the level that he or she is able to grasp.