Just Too Damned Perfect

I don't consider myself an especially petty or vindictive person. But some people just bring out the worst in me. Like the author Mark Salzman. I don’t know him personally, but I have a serious problem with him in the abstract. Not that there’s evidence that he's a bad person. On the contrary. Everything I know about him is positive, the picture of an effortlessly accomplished, talented, and multiple-faceted man. Is it any wonder that a mortal such as me finds him easy to resent? He studied martial arts while in high school, then studied Chinese language and literature at Yale. After graduating summa com laude, he headed off to China to teach English--as quite a few Americans have done. But not only did he do that well (judging by the anecdotes he shares) he also found time to attach himself to a martial arts master, to study calligraphy, befriend a fisherman and his family, even time to repair an abused and long-neglected piano, using a tuning wrench liberated from a touring orchestra, fashioning new pedals out of wooden rulers, chasing out rodents, and tuning it by using his Walkman (This was, after all, way back in 1982). Did I mention he's also an accomplished cellist? Then he came home and wrote a book about his trip, the best-selling "Iron & Silk". Later made into a movie by the same name. It gets worse. He decided to write fiction, and published three more well-received works: The Laughing Sutra, Lying Awake, and The Soloist (the latter nominated--of course-- for a Pulitzer). He also wrote a couple autobiographical pieces, Lost in Place: Growing Up Absurd in Suburbia, and True Notebooks, about, no surprise here, teaching English composition to juvenile delinquents. He has no doubt helped scads of little old ladies across streets, though that hasn't yet been documented despite the fact that he’s been featured in a documentary. He also, now, has a one-man show that he’s transformed into another book. He’s appeared in magazine ads for Dewar's scotch, picked up a Guggenheim fellowship and married an academy-award winning filmmaker. See what I mean? And, dammit, the books are well the worth reading. At least the three I've read so far. Iron & Silk, , referenced in the first paragraph above, is an engaging exploration of the clash between two cultures worlds that, especially back then, were poles apart on nearly every issue, political, spiritual, social. Salzman not only does a good job of exploring those differences, he also draws out the social fissures just beginning to appear in post -Mao China. One closes that book feeling that the Chinese students were not the only ones who benefited from Salzman’s trip. The Laughing Sutra, written five years after Salzman returned to the U.S., is a riff, sometimes serious, sometimes borderline cartoonish, on the Chinese martial arts culture as filtered through mystical Buddhist traditions, featuring a young martial arts disciple (raised by a Buddhist monk) transported from rural china to urban America, in search of a purloined sacred scroll. A funny, profound, and engaging piece of fiction. And the ultimate irony of the scroll in question is enough to make a Zen master smile, or even laugh. Lying Awake is a diametrically different take on the concepts of mysticism and meditation, a quiet, sensitive, and charming book about a nun and her commitment to the contemplative life. Where The Laughing Sutra offered physical heroics, this book features a deep and difficult inward journey. Sister has to decide whether her poetic insights and talents are a gift from god, or the merely mortal effects of a developing brain tumor. Profound, engaging, not funny. But satisfying. Though I haven't yet read The Soloist, I suppose we should give the Pulitzer people the benefit of the doubt. And I look forward to True Notebooks. Given his history thus far, how could Salzman fail to deliver?