The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Searching for Home
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Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications: 2019
134 pp. Paperback $16.95.
“I’ve always hated Zen.” That, predictably, is Norman Mailer shortly after meeting Lawrence Shainberg, author of the new memoir Four Men Shaking. 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
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