Book Review - The Masterpiece - by Francine Rivers
This “romance” novel could never be made into a Hallmark channel movie, in any conceivable space-time continuum. The gritty but realistic, in-depth depiction of the impact of parents’ dysfunctional lives on children when they grow up cannot be shown in a G-rated program. The story asks , can these people find love in any real sense (something beyond elevated pulse rates and swooning over steamy kisses)? Depends on a few things:
This “romance” novel could never be made into a Hallmark channel movie, in any conceivable space-time continuum. The gritty but realistic, in-depth depiction of the impact of parents’ dysfunctional lives on children when they grow up cannot be shown in a G-rated program. The story asks , can these people find love in any real sense (something beyond elevated pulse rates and swooning over steamy kisses)? Depends on a few things:
- What love is: a decision to commit to another person’s well-being.
- Growing up enough to make that kind of decision, not being driven by sentimentality, nor wallowing in wants and feelings.
- Overcoming the generational curses that adult children inherit from their parents
- Being willing to learn from the school of hard knocks.
These are the themes that this book explores in graphic but fascinating detail.
If there is any shortcoming in this novel, it is the deus ex machina conclusion that results in the protagonists living happily ever after. Really? Three months of pre-marital counseling that is passed over in one paragraph. Granted, for a novel of this length, the reader is ready for the author to resolve all issues keeping happiness away from our heroes. But this is the Hallmark Channel approach to romantic tension and conflict. Could a novel be written (and would it be subsequently read?) that walks through the storms of counseling, of confronting deeply buried childhood wounds, breaking agreement with ghosts of the sins of the fathers visited on the second and third generation? The realism of conflict in life trumped by the fantasy of fairy tale endings. Perhaps we need these endings because our own life is so painful.
One takeaway challenge: we as parents have transmitted our own dysfunction to our children. Everyone has, since Adam and Eve. What can we do? I see three specific thrusts, not part of this or any novel I have ever read:
- Seek out appropriate help to confront and renounce our own inherited and self-chosen sin: Counseling; pastoral care; personal self-examination (The examen prayer).
- Be honest with our children about our own failures and encourage them to seek and receive whatever practical help they can to shed the baggage we have left them. To renounce all agreements they have made with the world, the flesh, and the devil.
- In prayer, plead the blood of Jesus over our children, to break the curse of generational inherited sin.
