Book Review : Inner Voice Sends Hero Walking Toward New Age

Random Walk by Lawrence Block (St. Martin’s Press: $18.95; 345 pages)

As this novel opens, Guthrie (a bartender named either after Woody or Arlo, he can’t remember) is more or less just hanging out, killing time in a dead-end job. Guthrie drives a friend of his, Kit, to an abortion; she’s bummed out because, as far as she can figure it, the kid could have one of three fathers. Guthrie’s got his own worries. He drinks a little too much and smokes a lot; he’s a three-pack-a-day man.

Guthrie’s education has been both haphazard and self-administered. It runs heavily to consciousness raising: “Flirtations, brief ones, with Tai Chi and aikido. Yoga. Transcendental Meditation. Silva Mind Control and est.” That’s quite a lot of courses when you think about it, and they’ve left Guthrie in an uncomfortable no-man’s land where he knows just enough about all that stuff that “he could get a new car, or a newer old car, but he wouldn’t garage it or run it through a car wash regularly and before too long he’d re-create the car he already had.”

Another way of putting this is that, in New Age terms, Guthrie has gotten as far as Roquefort dressing. (He knows it’s oafish to order Thousand Island dressing in the great Cosmic Restaurant, but he doesn’t know much more.)

Inner Voice Speaks

Then, one faithful day, Guthrie hears an inner voice, loud and clear: “You could take a walk, “ the voice tells him. Pretty soon Guthrie does, and the novel, as a novel, soon runs into trouble. Other characters join him on his seemingly aimless nomadic trek. A Western dude named Jody starts to walk: His sole characterization seems to be that he calls Guthrie “Hoss.” (This seems careless of the author since Guthrie functions as a Christ-figure and Jody as his St. Paul.) Off in another place, an even hazier character, Sara (described as 41 years old, 105 pounds and 5 feet 4 inches), is rapidly going blind so that she can function as a mystic seer. The novelist here is so high-handed with poor old Sara that the reader has absolutely no idea why she would want to do this thing; why she, too, would want to go on a walk, why she’d take her 13-year-old son along on this journey.

The author is intent on inventing a “New Age”--a new step in our spiritual evolution--and characters are peripheral to that purpose.

The walk picks up steam; many more people join it. Guthrie stops smoking, people grow new teeth, cripples walk, and so on. But the author is oddly picky about this “New Age” he is creating. His pilgrims don’t need blankets, but they do need showers. They’re always stopping in restaurants, but no attention is paid to how they get their money. Sara goes on a vision quest, and it is revealed to her that these pilgrims have been chosen to heal the planet, which has a form of cancer.

That’s fine (at least with this reader), except the way Sara goes about healing the planet is to do a lot of group rebirthing exercises at night. (Rebirthing, for those who don’t know, is re-enacting the birth experience by means of guided imagery and very deep breathing. This points directly again to the author’s carelessness. If you don’t know about rebirthing, it ought to be explained more; if you do, it should be explained less.) But why should rebirthing, more than affirmations, visualizations, even simple prayer, be the particular key to renewing the species and the planet?

Villain Enters

There’s a villain here, a man named Mark, who, ironically, has also picked up his knowledge from consciousness-raising seminars in how to succeed in real estate. Mark’s materialism and imperfect knowledge--as well as a bad birth experience--have led him to a second career in serial killings. Mark has killed 101 ladies before this book has finished, and, again, to use the consciousness-raising vernacular, the author has put five times more energy into the gruesome details of these murders than he has put into the way Sara arranges her group for breathing exercises, or even into why walking, rebirthing, and building new energy fields will “fix” the world.

Sometimes consciousness-raisers take a bad rap for being, or “playing” dumb. But that’s just what Lawrence Block does here. Some literary scaffolding (in terms of the Bible or Christ’s exhortations to his disciples about leaving their earthly goods and going for a walk, or Chaucer’s opening of the “Canterbury Tales,” or even “The Pilgrim’s Progress”) would have been most welcome. Feeling that, simple characterization might have been nice. Never trust a novelist who loves his ideas more than his characters! (Even if he does have rebirthing down pat.)