Most self-centered book title of the year: Me & God

Most self-centered book title of the year: Me & God

Anyone who writes a book called Me & God thinks highly of themselves and poorly of God. Yet Arlen Faber’s best-seller has had 10 percent of the “God market” for 20 years. In those two decades, his idea of himself has only gotten smaller. He does his daily meditation, he really does, but when the doorbell goes off, he instinctively reacts with a series of quite impressive swear words as if he’s been practicing.

This is a man in some deep spiritual doodoo. One day his back gives out on him and he’s in so much pain that he has to crawl on his hands and knees to the new neighborhood chiropractor. She pushes here and probes there, and soon enough he is standing up straight again. He was in so much pain when he crawled in that he gave her his real name; he’s been underground for years, under deep cover from human beings. Elizabeth (Lauren Graham) has never heard of him, but her receptionist Anne (Olivia Thirlby) certainly has and this is how our hero begins to rediscover himself as a social being.

Jeff Daniels does an excellent job playing a misanthrope with back pain; not so much playing a man on a first-pronoun basis with God. Everything we see of Arlen suggests that anyone whose life was changed by reading his book only did the heavy lifting themselves, which leads us to wonder what it could possibly be about this book after all these years that still gets read still gets read after 20 years yet no one in the film repeats any single thing we can learn from the book? What did he say to God?

But this is not actually about spirituality; this is actually a romantic comedy, with sort of an awkward subplot involving an aimless bookseller (Lou Taylor Pucci), fresh out of rehab, who needs only what shambling, foul-mouthed wreck Arlen has to give. So Arlen is thus unwillingly dragged into another person’s problem even as he is slowly getting invested in Elizabeth’s and her 6-year old son Alex (Max Antisell).

The early sequences of the film play like outtakes from a manic Jim Carrey comedy. Which isn’t such a bad thing. The movie then proceeds down the well-worn paths of many, many rom-coms that have come before it. “(500) Days of Summer,” for instance now there’s a movie about life complications versus this one, which breezily ticks off the cliches.

But about that God business. I need to share with you one of my favorite journalism stories here, if you’ll indulge me. Richard Harding Davis was reputedly sent by William Randolph Hearst to cover the Johnstown flood; this is how Davis led his story: “God stood on a mountaintop here and looked at what his waters had wrought.” To which Hearst cabled back: “Forget flood. Interview God.”

Great story! I looked up that quote online never trust anything from memory and came across a blog post by Dennis G. Jerz of Seton Hill University discussing this same anecdote, which I have apparently related four times in print since 1993, sometimes tweaking it ever so slightly but nonetheless Good gravy! My only defense for trotting it out again is that it is more interesting than anything else I could say about The Answer Man.

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