A perpetual 9-to-5 in an antiseptic office tower, tedious tasks, clueless colleagues, stringent and watchful upper management, and – shudder – a mall in the basement. Surely this is hell? In Emily Schultz’s Heaven Is Small, this portrait of corporate banality is actually heaven. More specifically, The Heaven Book Company, an exceedingly successful publishing house where dead souls churn out romance novels.
The socially uneasy Gordon Small is one such unfortunate. A failed writer in life, he is hired by Heaven as a proofreader following his death, “an event he had failed to notice”. Gordon remains foggy about his newly departed status for nearly the first third of the novel, busily adapting to Heaven’s maze of bureaucracy, awkwardly interacting with new co-workers, and quickly becoming bored by the material he’s assigned to proof. During these early chapters, Schultz’s descriptive prowess actually works against her: the monotony of office work is so skilfully depicted that the story itself gets off to a sluggish start.
Gordon brings to Heaven the same insecurities and obsessions that plagued him in life. These centre mainly on his ex-wife, Chloe Gold, a renowned poet and novelist whose successes left Gordon and his own middling writing career in the dust. His fixation makes him restless, unable to settle into the lacklustre routine at Heaven. He wanders, roaming Heaven’s halls, the subway, and his old neighbourhood. As Gordon begins to understand the true nature of his condition and, subsequently, question his and his co-workers’ sterile existence at Heaven, Schultz hits her stride. The novel takes off and develops into an absorbing comic story of rebellion and redemption, Gordon finding the nerve to act in death in ways he was too timid for in life.
Heaven Is Small is Schultz’s fourth book and second novel, following the excellent Joyland, her mesmerizing tale of 1980s adolescence. With Heaven Is Small, Schultz broadens her appeal while continuing to demonstrate a gift for prose and the inspired turn of phrase. In many ways, this is also a novelist’s novel, examining as well as lampooning the writing life, its pitfalls and rewards. Gordon Small’s existential examinations of his purpose at Heaven when “no one…knows…that this building exists” mirror a writer’s anxiety over the prospect of toiling in obscurity. Still, in death, Gordon experiences liberation from the inhibitions and reservations that impeded his writing in life. “What I have been given here at Heaven is truly a gift…Endless hours, infinite light, paper supplies, envelopes, free postage.” The subtle injection of humour, like Gordon’s beloved free stamps, into the most earnest of moments is trademark Schultz. She never hits the reader over the head with it, shrewdly allowing what isn’t said to speak loudly and clearly.
Some twenty-five years ago, Morrissey penned the memorable lines, “I was looking for a job and then I found a job, and heaven knows I’m miserable now.” For Emily Schultz, Heaven, thanks to its HR department’s closed-circuit cameras, knows even more than that. In Heaven Is Small, Schultz succeeds in imagining an amusing world where eternal life is a fate worse than death.
Mark Paterson is the author of the short story collections A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers. Recently, his story “Spring Training” won first prize in the 5th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest and will appear in the summer issue of Geist.
