A man sits down to begin writing a book in which the main character is God. This man is not one of those people who wants to write a book and then does not, nor is he one of those people who writes a book and then sticks it in a drawer, and nor is he one of those people who writes a book and then sends the manuscript to hundreds of publishing houses, all of whom reject it for lack of skill and/or imagination; rather, he is one of those rare people who has already written and published several young adult novels, many of which have gone on to become bestsellers. When such a man sits down to begin writing a book, there has to be a certain amount of audacity that accompanies the decision to write a book in which the main character is God. The audacity goes beyond the thought that one is actually capable of putting words in God’s mouth, extending to the knowledge that one’s writing will be read by a sizable (and as young adults, impressionable) audience.
But there must be more to it than audacity. The spiritual system espoused in Sati, Christopher Pike’s first ‘adult’ novel, implies that, for him at least, the audacity must have been accompanied by a certain amount of largesse. The God of Sati (a young looking woman named Sati) is a loving and forgiving God, a God who implores her creations to do what honestly makes them happy (”The key word here is ‘honestly’… Examine what truly makes you happy” (111-112)), a God who says, “be simple, be natural, and you will come close to being who you really are” (112). The proper word is ‘largesse’ because the gifts that Sati brings to those who surround her in the novel are the same that Pike brings to his reader, gifts whose value cannot be estimated on a tangible scale, but rather, must be appreciated on an intangible one: “Don’t think too much about life,” Sati says, “Live it…It is necessary only that you be naturally helpful to others. And you help others most by being happy. It is very simple” (113).
Sati was published in 1990. Several similar books hit the market around the same time: Richard Bach’s One (1988), Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael (1992), and with over 20 million copies in print, the phenomenon of James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy (1993). Each of these novels utilized the narrative possibilities of fiction to introduce their own unique blends of Western philosophy and Eastern mysticism to mass audiences.
While examples of “new age” spiritualities have been present in the West since at least the countercultural movement of the 1960s (not to mention Madame Blavotsky’s Theosophy movement of the 1870s), the fictionalization of their tenets seems to have been most prevalent in the early 1990s. Counter-examples exist, of course, from Nevil Shute’s Round the Bend (1951) to Robert Pirsig’s Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) to Richard Bach’s earlier works, Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970) and Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977), but the success of Sati, Ishmael, One, and The Celestine Prophecy suggests that there was something specific to the early 1990s that desired the ‘new age’ spirituality developed by these novels.1
But it was the decision to present their spiritual teachings in a fictional form that made each of these books interesting. One wonders if the authors developed the spiritual instructions before or after they selected the narrative form, and whether the decision transformed the instructions in any meaningful way. Daniel Quinn has written that his best-selling novel went through seven distinct versions before becoming Ishmael, and that the eighth version was “also the only version written as a novel.” While it is easy to assert that the authors presented their ideas within the narrative form in the hopes of reaching an audience wider than the traditional “self-help” market, such a claim would be difficult to prove.
Regardless of the reasoning behind the decision, the fact that they did present their alternative spiritualities in novelistic forms allowed them to develop characters and present scenes that strengthened the presentations of those spiritualities. In Sati, Pike’s fictional God interacts with a community of characters, almost all of whom accept her claim that she is God, if not immediately, then definitely by the end of the book. The narrator, Michael, has his doubts throughout the novel, but those doubts are presented along the lines of “even if she is not God, then she’s at least someone very special.” This is the kind of doubt the reader is expected to feel, as if Pike was saying, “You don’t have to believe that this is the teachings of God, but you should consider them the gifts of a graceful, beautiful, loving, and powerful soul.”
That’s not audacity. That’s largesse.
Notes
While this ’something’ is beyond the scope of an annotation, this author suggests (without further research to back it up) that the economic recession of the early 1990s forced people to look for alternative ways to become ’successful.’ ↑.
