Breakfast with Buddha by Roland Merullo

In 1993, at age 45, I packed up my car and moved to Texas to attend grad school at Baylor University. Over the years, I have made about 40 round trips driving to and from Philadelphia. I always enjoyed those rides as a time to relax and unwind after a long semester teaching. I listened to music or a book on tapes or CDs, I stopped when and where I wanted for a rest, to eat, or perhaps an antique store, flea market, or historical site. Most of the time, I traveled alone, but I always found the trips refreshing.

Roland Merullo’s Breakfast with Buddha tells the story of Otto Ringling, 45, whose parents have died in an automobile accident in North Dakota. He loads up his car, says his goodbyes to his wife, Jeannie, and two children, and heads to his sister’s home in New Jersey. He expects to have Cecelia as a passenger for the trip, but she convinces Otto to take Volya Rinpoche, her spiritual adviser instead.

Otto, who works as a book editor for a small publishing house, is in no mood for nonsense. Initially, he resists interacting with Rinpoche, but gradually comes under the sage’s spell. Rinpoche is a Tibetan honorific, which means “precious one,” and it is usually applied to a respected teacher.

The story more than held my interest all the way to the end. Through attempts at Yoga, riddles, and stories, Otto eventually began to appreciate what Rinpoche had to offer. Otto declares himself a Christian without regular church attendance. He finds repellant Christians who believe what “ails us is more and stricter rules, more narrow-mindedness, more hatred, more sectioning off of the society, and it has always seemed to me that, if Christ’s message could be distilled down to one line, that line would have to do with kindness and inclusiveness, not rules and divisiveness.” (153) My sentiments precisely!

The last couple of chapters sum up what Otto has gained on the journey. The reluctant “hero” of the story really learns a lot about himself and his life. He always insists he has a good life, with a loving wife, two great kids, and a good job he loved, but Rinpoche pushes him to experience more. Merullo writes,

“Something was changing us with each breath, each second. The delusion of youth was that you believed you’d never reach middle age, and the delusion of middle age made you believe you could go on more or less indefinitely the way things were. Yes, the kids would grow up. Yes, you’d grow old and eventually pass away. But, really, there were so many pleasures to be had between now and then, so many tennis games, so many meals, so many weeks at the Cape and the ski lodge, so tremendously much to do before that other stage of life eventually set in.” (315)

Published by Algonquin Press of Chapel Hill, Merullo’s Breakfast with Buddha is a pleasant and thought-provoking read. I have collected novels from this publisher for almost 30 years, and this one convinces me, yet again, I have done the right thing. (5 stars)

--Chiron, 2/13/12

Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell by Ellen Douglas

Ellen Douglas wrote eight novels when she published this memoir in 1998. As the dust jacket says, “Douglas is the pseudonym for Josephine Haxton, whose family roots extend back to the earliest days in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. These four tales describe her search for details of her ancestors. Sometimes she meets with talkative relatives who surprise her with some interesting information. Others stonewall her search, because she used the information from previous interviews in her novels and changed some important details.

This work should interest those who enjoy the historical aspects of fiction. Douglas talks about how she could use some people and incidents from her investigation in her next novel. Her meticulous search of records and memories of her family – and those who knew her family – adds a lot of weight to these tales. She readily admits when she will have to fill in gaps.

The most interesting of the four stories – “Julia and Nellie” – tells the history of her paternal grandmother, Nellie, and her friend, Julia, and a cousin, Dunbar (Dunny). Her prose has a soft and gentle quality – musical, enchanting, and absorbing. “I am sure now that I remember my grandmother and Julia—and Dunny, too—on the gallery at The Forest on a long, hot summer afternoon. I recall an embrace and then the two women in intimate, quiet conversation. I hear their soft voices, Julia’s pitched a shade lower than my grandmother’s, the voices, it seems to me now, of ghosts, alive only in my head and only for the time left to me to remember them. I remember the call and response of those voices as I might remember music—the oboe making room for the flute and then meditatively answering—and, like oboe and flute, they speak with deep emotion, but wordlessly.” (81)

One incident in particular eluded her best efforts to uncover details. In 1861, an unknown number of slaves were tortured and whipped, and some were executed, because of a plot to kill slave owners as soon as “Mr. Lincoln and his army” came to Mississippi. Several “gentlemen of the county” served as judges, jury, and executioners. No newspapers reported the event, no record of any burials exist. The only evidence Douglas uncovered involved lists of slaves “interviewed” about the plot.

I most definitely need to track down some of those novels. (5 stars)

--Chiron, 9/26/10

Tomato Girl by Jane Pupek

Review for Early Reviewers program of www.LibraryThing.com

This is one intense novel. Not since I read Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons (also from Algonquin Press) have I read a story so terrible, so graphic, so intense, and so absorbing. I started to read on Sunday, but had to stop after the first chapter for an unexpected short trip for lunch with some family members. On Monday afternoon, I started over, and could hardly put it down. With 40 (of 300 pages) left, I stopped at 11 last night completely exhausted. To say this novel is a “page-turner” is to elevate the term beyond the meaning I always associated with it – an interesting, thrilling beach read where the hero gets the girl/guy, and they sail off into the sunset putting some hair-breadth escapes behind them. Tomato Girl has none of those elements.

This novel is like a vacuum – not the Hoover kind, but the absolute space vacuum that sucks all the breath, blood, and life right out of the reader. True, I could not put it down, but I did hold my breath as I turned many pages.

Eleven-year old Ellie lives with her father and mother in, what at first seems to be a “white-picket fence” existence. Only a few hints of dark clouds float in that first chapter, but the story builds like a distant hurricane that approaches the shore. Rupert, Ellie’s dad, manages a local general store. Something seems not right with Julie, Ellie’s mother, and when she falls down the cellar stairs, she is hospitalized for a few days. This is when the family unravels, and Ellie is forced to handle too much, to keep too many secrets, to witness much more than any 11-year-old ought to.

The novel is told from Ellie’s point of view, and she grows into a woman in a matter of weeks. Her decisions and choices always seem right, but somehow fate or circumstances sometimes interfere. Pupek has captured, in a consistent and completely believable manner, the mind of a young girl on the cusp of her teen years.

The only sour note for me was the character Clara, a local woman, who lives in the “wrong” part of town and befriends Ellie. This woman has magic, clairvoyance, and the ability to raise a dead chicken. She does comfort Ellie, and she imparts some important lessons, but she could easily have done all that without candles, sprinkled salt, or buried menstrual blood.

Jayne Pupek has written an incredible first novel. Definitely not for children, the squeamish, or the faint of heart, but I give this novel 5 solid gold stars.

--Chiron, 7/8/08