Thank God. He's bought a house.
William Paul Young, that is - the world's hottest new novelist, a guy who not 16 months ago was working, in his words, as "a general manager, janitor and inside sales guy" for a small company in Milwaukie, Ore.; a guy who, "with a couple of jobs on the side," was living in a rented house because he'd declared bankruptcy in 2003 and had been forced to auction the home he'd owned for almost 20 years.
And now? Well, Young - born 54 years ago this month in Grande Prairie, Alta. - and his wife of 30 years, Kim, are getting ready to move into their very own four-bedroom home in a suburb of Portland, Ore., with a guest cottage out back. "Omigosh, it's a good time to be buying a house, lemme tell you," Young said enthusiastically recently during a visit to Toronto.
The Youngs' change in fortune is due to one thing only, and it's not the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. It's the phenomenal success of William Paul's debut novel, The Shack, which has been at or near the top of the national bestseller lists in both the United States and Canada for close to a year. The book has taken Young from quasi-rags to real riches and, unlike other semi-instant millionaires who, after their windfall, say, "Nope, I'm goin' back to the post-office job first thing Monday, same as usual," he's happy to let the money change everything.
Actually, not entirely everything. Sure, Young's "not holding down three jobs any more" and the new house is nice, especially for the three kids (out of the six) that are still at home, and the travel is good. He was in Toronto, for instance, to speak at Wycliffe College, an Anglican seminary at the University of Toronto. "But in terms of the things that matter to us," he said, "it hasn't changed anything."
Anyone who's read TheShack will understand why this is so. A sort of 21st-century Pilgrim's Progress, it's about the redemption of Mackenzie Allen Phillips, an Oregonian who's spent the last four years grieving over the disappearance (and likely murder) of his youngest daughter. One wintry day, he gets a typewritten letter in an unstamped envelope inviting him to visit the isolated shack where evidence of his daughter's murder was discovered. It's signed "Papa" - the nickname of sorts that Mack's religious wife Nan uses for God.
Young thinks a big part of the novel's appeal derives from it not being explicitly Christian
Mack resists at first, but eventually he drives to the shack where, for the next three days, he experiences a Christian therapy/healing session and theology workout involving God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. God in this instance is a large, hug-giving African-American woman calling herself, uh-huh, Papa - a gambit in mixed metaphors to keep him "from falling so easily back into [his] religious conditioning."
While there's long been a large market for religious fiction in North America, especially in the U.S., it's still rare for religious novelsto cross over as mainstream successes, especially in Canada (225,000 copies have been sold here) and especially one like The Shack that started as a self-publishing effort by Young and two former pastors from California.
Young thinks a big part of the novel's appeal derives from it not being explicitly Christian. There's little or no Scripture in it. The novel, to Young's mind, "has given to people a language to have a conversation about God, evil, suffering and healing. ... a language they didn't have before because all the language before has been very religious, loaded with religious land mines and everything else."
Finally, though, Young acknowledges the overwhelming success of his novel is, well . . . "a mystery. I mean, I know why I had to be the one who wrote it. Because it comes out of my history, my damage, my pain, my process. Why does anyone write anything? Because it's specific to who they are.
