Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Essay -- Philosophy Religion

Told by the blurb that we have here one of the most unique and excite books in the history of American letters, one bridles both at the grammar of the declare and at its r come inine excess. The grammar stays irreparable. But I have a hunch that the assertion itself is valid. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance An motion Into Values, by Robert M. Pirsig (Morrow), is as willfully awkward as its title. It is densely chuck together. It lurches, with a deliberate shift of its grave ballast, between fiction and philosophic discourse, between a private memoir and the formulaic imper passwordality of an engineering or trade journal. As it stands, it is a very long book, but overlay has it, and fault lines indicate, that a much longer text lies behind it. integrity hears of an eight- hundred-thousand-word draft and feels perversely deprived of it by the mere sanity and sophism of the publisher. Zen and the Art is awkward both to live with and to write about. It lodges in the min d as few recent novels have, deepening its grip, compelling the decorate into unexpected planes of order and menace.   The narrative thread is deceptively trite. Father and son are on a motorcycle holiday, traveling from Minneapolis toward the Dakotas, then across the mountains, turning south to Santa Rosa and the Bay. Asphalt, motels, hairpins in the knife-cold of the Rockies, fog and desert, the waters dividing, then the vineyards and the tawny flanks of the sea. Mr. Pirsig is not the first ever to burst Kerouac has been here in advance him, and Humbert Humbert, a clutch of novels, films, stories, television serials of loners on the move, lapping the silent miles, toast or drenched under the big skies, motelling from one neon seaport to the next, and glidin... ... exception. The cracker-barrel voice grinds on, sententious and flat. But the book is inspired, original abounding to impel us across gray patches. And as the mountains gentle toward the sea with father and child locked in a ghostly grip-the narrative tact, the absolute economy of effect, defy criticism.   A detailed technical treatise on the tools, on the routines, on the metaphysics of a specialized skill the legend of a spacious hunt after identity, after the salvation of mind and soul out of obsession, the hunter being hunted a fiction repeatedly off-and-on(a) by, and meshed with, a lengthy meditation on the ironic and sad singularities of American man- the analogies with Moby Dick are patent. Robert Pirsig invites the prodigious comparison. It is at many points, including, even, the closely complete absence of women, suitable. What more can one say?