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“I’VE ALWAYS HATED ZEN.” That, predictably, is Norman Mailer shortly after meeting Lawrence Shainberg, author of the new memoir Four Men Shaking {{sfn|Shainberg|2019}}. Published in 2019 by Shambhala, the main narrative arc of the memoir takes place over a short time, recounting the final visit of Kyudo Nakagawa, a Zen master, to his SoHo ''zend'' in New York. Although brief, ''Four Men Shaking'', a series of tight vignettes, flows back and forth over the last fifty years detailing significant moments of Shainberg’s life and his attempts to reconcile his career as a writer with his pursuit of Zen. This contradiction establishes the fundamental conflict of the memoir and the relationships Shainberg develops, mainly with his literary influences Samuel Beckett and Norman Mailer, and his Buddhist teacher, who Shainberg calls Roshi, or “old master.”

There is much in this memoir that will be of interest to readers of this journal, especially Shainberg’s accounts of his meetings with Beckett and Mailer. Shainberg links the former’s interest in “not-knowing, not-perceiving, the whole world of incompleteness” to his interest in Zen, while Mailer’s influence is one of conflict and passion about the external world, his honesty, and his ability to bring a novelist’s sensibility to journalism. Half- serious, Mailer’s above assessment of Zen was both a reaction to Shainberg’s first memoir, ''Ambivalent Zen'', and a friendly goading of the writer that begins their friendship—one that continues through Mailer’s waning years, mostly through shared meals at Michael Shay’s, thumb wrestling, and discussion/debates.

In this context, Shainberg’s friendship with Mailer does not seem too paradoxical. He discovered Mailer through ''The Armies of the Night'' {{sfn|Shainberg|1968}}, wherein “Mailer had found his voice by letting go of himself, discovered his vision with total surrender to objective reality.” While this last statement might be too generous, Shainberg borrows Mailer’s approach in ''Armies''—“a perfect combination of real-world description and novelistic skill”—for Brain Surgeon. Mailer’s influence leads to the success of Shainberg’s book, and, as Beckett will tell him later, his strength as a writer in “witnessing.” Indeed, while ''Four Men Shaking'' is about Shainberg’s self-discovery, its strength seems to be in Shainberg’s accounts of meeting with Mailer, Beckett, and his Roshi during the last years of their lives.

While not an explicit theme in ''Four Men Shaking'', mortality for the four men weighs significantly on the narrative. Part of Shainberg’s interest in the brain is derived from its deviant pathology or the brain damage that skews perceptions and therefore one’s relationship with the external world. Early in his account, Shainberg associates his interest in the workings of the brain with his writing and concludes that these lead to an obsession that reinforced a false sense of self: “That was the real brain damage—self-absorption and the fixations it engendered.” Shainberg seems to link brain damage with a desire to impose fictitious forms on reality, like his attempts as a novelist: “What is writing anyway but another form of brain damage?” As a journalist, Shainberg is able to witness and break through the ego. Shainberg’s relationship with Beckett in his declining years illustrates this point, as the latter ruminates on his aging brain: “With diminished concentration, loss of memory obscured intelligence—what you, I suspect, would call ‘brain damage’—the more chance there is for saying something closest to what one really is.” Ultimately, the search for meaning and order is futile when that which is used to process it finally breaks down and dies.

This final third of the memoir is the story of the last retreat, a seven-day ''sesshin'', at the SoHo ''zend''. At 80, Roshi has decided to sell the ''zend'' when he returns to Japan, so this will be the final ''sesshin'' Shainberg and twenty others will share with Roshi in New York. It is during this ritual where these narratives come together, and Shainberg develops the metaphor for finding his “long-lost home.” Whether Shainberg is ultimately successful might be up for discussion—I won’t give away any more here—but he was successful in leaving me with a lot to contemplate about myself, my own influences, and ultimately what I will leave behind. As I said above: I do not want to give the impression that Shainberg’s memoir is depressing or maudlin, but it is honest and compelling. It left me with a sense, finally, of a resonant ambivalence (perhaps akin to Shainberg’s own shaking), similar to my feelings upon finishing Herman Hesse’s ''Siddhartha'', in my role as a fellow human on his own search for a long-lost home.