Searching for Home

Authors

  • Gerald R. Lucas Middle Georgia State University Author

Keywords:

Lawrence Shainberg, Zen Buddhism, memoir, Samuel Beckett, mortality, Norman Mailer friendship

Abstract

Gerald R. Lucas reviews Lawrence Shainberg’s Four Men Shaking (Shambhala Publications), a brief memoir built around the last New York visit of Shainberg’s Zen teacher and his friendships with Samuel Beckett and Norman Mailer. Lucas traces the book’s central tension between Shainberg’s writing life and his pursuit of Zen, links it to his earlier books on the brain, and finds the memoir’s strength in its accounts of Mailer, Beckett, and Roshi in their final years. Reading the book alongside the death of Rush drummer Neil Peart, Lucas calls it short but dense, honest rather than maudlin, and leaving a resonant ambivalence about mortality and meaning.

Author Biography

  • Gerald R. Lucas, Middle Georgia State University

    Gerald R. Lucas is Professor of English at Middle Georgia State University and the editor of Project Mailer. He serves as Vice-President of the Norman Mailer Society, the Digital Editor of The Mailer Review, and the Society’s webmaster. Recently, Lucas acted as the editor for J. Michael Lennon and Donna Pedro Lennon’s expanded and updated Norman Mailer: Works and Days, and he created and maintains the digital Humanities project based on the same.

Downloads

Published

2019-10-10

Issue

Vol. 13 No. 1 (2019)

Section

Book Reviews

How to Cite

Lucas, Gerald R. “Searching for Home”. The Mailer Review, vol. 13, no. 1, Oct. 2019, pp. 204–207, https://mailerreview.org/journal/article/view/698.