Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

I was a big fan of this book's original form, "Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (PAVM)," when it came out in 2000. Either way, the premise remains the same: Donald Miller and his friend Paul leave Texas in a beat-up Volkswagen van to seek their destiny in Oregon. Along the way they experience cool places, meet interesting people, and wrestle with various life issues. I'm a Christian who loves to travel, so I liked the combination of a literal and spiritual journey. Five years later, Donald Miller has achieved a measure of fame by writing a couple of other Gen-X Christian bestsellers. Perhaps that gave him the clout to pull a Stephen King and rework a previously published book into "Through Painted Deserts." I read somewhere that his purpose this time around was to tell the real story of how the trip went. But there are no momentous revelations - only added flowery exposition, a new anecdote or two, and some cruder male bonding episodes (I sold my copy of "PAVM" awhile back, so I couldn't do a thorough comparison between the two).

The somewhat lofty new title (I liked the old one better) reflects a high-minded literary bent I don't remember from the first time around. There's a serious helping of purple prose about life, nature, and spirituality, especially in the first half or so. It got to be a bit much at times; the writer's admonition to "kill your darlings" came to mind. And some political comments, coupled with a favorable comparison of Northwest women vs. their Texan counterparts, indicate that he's become the Oregonian "granola" Paul accused him of being even before he got here. Between such banter (and a tiff or two), they get serious and discuss deeper Christian guy stuff about what they want in a wife, the meaning of a God-centered life, and so on. Within this context, Mr. Miller ruminates on Christianity's "why" answers to life vs. science's "how" answers. It wasn't quite a Schaeffer vs. Dawkins level of internal monologue, but it was good and relevant nonetheless.

Although I enjoyed seeing how time has affected Mr. Miller, I'm not sure why this book had to be written. Indeed, I wish the original had been re-released instead. Perhaps I've changed as well over five years, but there was something about his virgin effort that made a bigger impression on me. I think those that missed the first release (which I believe is out of print) would have liked following his spiritual and literary progression from "PAVM" through "Blue Like Jazz" and "Searching for God Knows What." But regardless of edition, the interpersonal interactions are real, and there's gold to be mined out of the expository passages. Plus, it was intriguing to get an outsider's description about my native region. I still trip out on the fact that he and Paul eventually wound up in my hometown and experienced more adventures there than I ever did.

"Through Painted Deserts" is a looking glass into a pivotal formative experience of Donald Miller's life. If you enjoyed his other books, and would like some insights into Mr. Miller's spiritual formation, than by all means check this one out. But get "PAVM" if you can track it down, if only to see how he was when he first started out.

Retitled and re-released after Donald Miller's more recent and more successful books, this is a chronicle of a road trip taken by a young, searching person (the author) and his friend. They patch together a Volkswagon bus and hit the road, without a timeframe or a destination in mind. Their adventures are recounted here, and even though as far as adventures go they're pretty tame, the journey itself is the real point.

The book's message is powerful and struck me on a personal level: Just leave. Most of us don't see how small our lives are, how much we cling to the known, and how much we miss when we limit our horizons to the safe, to what common wisdom tells us is secure. It awakens something in me, the opening preamble of a wistful thought that has not yet found completion. Perhaps it's related to my turning 30 earlier in the year, but here it is, my favorite part and the introductory paragraph that told me I had to take the book home and begin reading it that night.

"Leave. ... Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn't it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don't worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed."

In this volume, Miller gently reminds the modernist that, in the final analysis, the big questions -- the 'why' questions -- determine whether the 'how' questions are important. Gently is the operative adverb.

Although I am not of the generation to whom this books is most naturally directed (older teens through thirty-somethings), and although I am an admitted so-called modernist (which is neither strictly good nor bad, but simply describes most westerners of the past three centuries), I find Donald Miller's observations to be important, consistently valid, and persistently fun. Here's a clip from the second chapter, which should give you a sense for Miller's prose:

"The trouble with you and me is that we are used to what is happening to us. We grew into our lives . . . never able to process the enigma of our composition. Think about this for a moment: if you weren't a baby and you came to earth as a human with a fully developed brain and had the full weight of the molecular experience occur to you at once, you would hardly have the capacity to respond in any cognitive way to your experience. But because we were born as babies and had to be taught to speak and to pee in a toilet, we think all of this is normal. Well, it isn't normal. Nothing is normal. It is all rather odd, isn't it, our eyes in our heads . . . the capacity to understand beauty, to feel love, to feel pain.
"If I do lose faith, that is if I do let go of my metaphysical explanations for the human experience, it will not be at the hands of science. I went to a Stephen Hawking lecture not long ago and wondered about why he thought we get born and why we die and what it means, but I left with nothing, save a brief mention of aliens as a possible solution to the question of origin. And I don't mean anything against Stephen Hawking, because I know he has an amazing brain . . . but I went wondering about something scientific that might counter mysterious metaphysical explanations, and I left with aliens."

The book is a kind of travelogue of a journey both physical and metaphysical; the details need not be related here. There are fanatical, reactionary 'christian' critics who love to hate Donald Miller, which is quite sad. A friend lent my daughter a copy of Miller's 'Blue Like Jazz,' she read it, my wife read it, I read it, my other two daughters read it -- which is honestly amazing, we have different tastes in books, yet we all enjoyed it and all might list it among our most recommendable. I think you'll enjoy 'Through Painted Deserts' and 'Blue Like Jazz' (unless you're a belligerent, religious nut, or a numb-hearted materialist). Miller inspires introspection, and does so with a light heart and a ready wit.

Paul: "You can't beat [Lynyrd] Skynyrd."
Don: "I could if I had a bat."