Volume 21, Number 10 · June 13, 1974
Good Trip
By Robert M. Adams
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
by Robert M. Pirsig
William Morrow, 412 pp., $7.95
Earnest, innocent, awkward, authentic—long on character and short on formal art (but that includes a blessed lack of artfulness)—Robert Pirsig's book is an ungainly piece of do-it-yourself American Gothic. It is a novel, a travelogue, a quest, a set of lectures, and a secular confession, with some sketchy information on motorcycle maintenance thrown in for good measure. In his subtitle the author describes it as 'an inquiry into values,' and it's that too. But anything you call it, it's also something else. They may seem silly, but these problems of nomenclature are symptomatic; the book is exasperating and impressive in about equal measure, which is to say greatly. It's a completely heteroclite performance.
Review, 2152 words
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