The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Searching for Home: Difference between revisions

{{Quote box|title=''Four Men Shaking''|By Lawrence Shainberg<br />Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications: 2019<br />134 pp. Paperback $16.95.|align=right|width=25%}}

{{dc|dc=T|hat, 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.”