Fowler spent 17 years in silence as a Trappist monk—and the next 26 making up for lost time. Today the married former priest and "ex-Christian" is a syndicated newspaper columnist and lecturer who tweaks religious institutions of all stripes with an unorthodox message: that the surest path to spiritual discovery generally lies outside organized faiths. "Every church I had ever experienced," Fowler writes in this engagingly frank account of his own tortuous spiritual odyssey, "had proved that while it had some good things to offer many, it had narrow horizons and pointless asides to insist upon for all."
Outspokenness such as this is probably the last thing those who knew the author as a boy in Montana would have predicted. On the family ranch Fowler grew up profoundly insecure, kept at arm's length by a father who had shut down emotionally after his wife died following her third abortion, when George was 4. At 17, Fowler fled into the Navy, the first of several institutions that he hoped would define him and supply the self-confidence he lacked. But there—as in his subsequent way stations, including the remote abbey in the mountains of Utah that the Catholic convert would enter three years later—even the most rigid discipline was not enough to restrain his questing spirit.
As Fowler relates in this often self-critical chronicle, his has been a long, strange trip. It took him to the ascetic monastic life of 2 a.m. reveilles arid boiled vegetables, the libertine excesses of Haight Ashbury in its trippy heyday, flirtations with homosexuality, romance with a nun (who later became his wife) and, following his excommunication (for marrying), a pilgrim's progress of jobs that included counseling returning Vietnam veterans and overseeing the security design for a nuclear submarine base. Though Fowler's own focus remains on his inner journey and the supposed inspiration it may offer others, readers are likely to find themselves agreeably distracted by the confessional autobiography he spins.
The book's problems have less to do with Fowler's writing skill and insight than the fact that it's hard to discuss subjects like meditative epiphanies without sounding like Robert Fulghum on a bad aura day. As the author himself, whose previous volume was Feed Your Soul, a cookbook combining menus and meditations that he cowrote, states, "The touch of God cannot be shared, but only experienced." And yet, in sharing his story, Fowler succeeds in touching us. (Addison Wesley, $23)
by Joyce Maynard
It's no accident that the heroine of Joyce (To Die For) Maynard's new novel is known throughout simply as Claire. Lacking a surname, this al-most-40, divorced New England working mother is a kind of Everywoman of the '90s, someone with whom many readers can identify. Smart, funny and hip in a college-educated, real way, she is the personification of a baby boomer who discovers in midlife that relationships—with lovers, with other women, with coworkers and with children—are more complicated than she'd expected.
While still necessarily connected to her ex-husband, Claire is looking for love and finds that it is hard to come by. Her one big affair since her divorce, with a baseball fanatic named Mickey, has now become a best-friends-by-telephone relationship since Mickey doesn't want a girlfriend with kids. But when Claire meets Tim, a divorced father, things start looking up: He's a caring man who adores Claire and would like nothing better than to blend their families.
Given that this is an endlessly self-analytical group of folks, however, the path of could-be true love will not be smooth. Tim, in a way, is too good to be true; at least, he's not the kind of edgy neurotic Claire tends to favor. Factor in that her kids hate him and his daughter and you've got the makings of a dysfunctional Yours, Mine, and Ours.
Maynard is a fluid writer, and there are many scenes of domestic confusion and emotional longing that ring true. But there's also something annoying about this book: Instead of simply telling us Claire's story, Maynard uses her as a symbol, a means to address issues about women of her generation. As she did in her famous debut memoir, Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties (1973), she turns herself and her peers into predictable, tiresome bores. (Crown, $23)
edited by Amy Hempel and Jim Shepard
Not long after she heard the one-line poem an Irish setter "composed" 11 (with a little help from his owner), Amy Hempel coaxed a haiku about lost love from her own dog, and later Jim Shepard's bowser Audrey was "inspired" by T.S. Eliot ("Shall I drink from the toilet? Do I dare steal from the plate?"). Wondering if other canines were similarly well-versed, they asked more than 60 writers to contribute poems "transcribed" from their dogs.
The mutts take to meter as if it were chow, a popular topic. "It's 5 a.m. I'm wide awake so to your bed I race. Won't you please get up and shove some groceries in my face?" begs comedy writer Merrill Markoe's Lewis. Tasha, via Charles Baxter, is contemplative: "Life isn't meaningless, because there's food/ Consider kibble: its smell, its taste, its mood."
The talent hunt yields more than lighthearted doggerel, though. Even if you didn't know writer Natalie Kusz's shocking history—at age 7 she was savaged and almost killed by wild dogs—her kinship with her greyhound Julio would seem remarkable.
Complemented by photos of the poetic pooches with their humans, Unleashed is a fetching read. (Crown, $19)
by Jonathan Waterman
This deft mix of adventure, history and lyrical reflection might as aptly be called, "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" Actually subtitled "Eight Hundred Miles Down the Baja," Waterman's account of two months' kayaking along the Baja California desert coast with his wife, Deborah, stays afloat partly because of updates on their already shaky, yearlong union. The fights and affections of this mid-30s Colorado couple testing their love in the wild add poignancy to what might have been just another portrait of nature in decline.
For example, after weeks of hard paddling down the starkly beautiful eastern coast of the peninsula, Deborah has a migraine and thumps her hands against the kayak, yelling at her husband for not helping her. They beach their boats, she takes a pain pill, then lies down in the sand. "I come back to her," Waterman writes, "and say that I love her and rub her feet as she moans, writhing on her back.... Our own relationship—clinging to this raft of love—seems our only chance of survival. Without each other we would be lost on a dying sea."
By trip's end, after more headaches and other hardships, the couple discover they can survive a harsh, remote wilderness and still remain in love. (Simon & Schuster, $22)
by Thom Jones
Russian roulette may be an unorthodox cure for depression, but it worked for Richard, just back from "playing doctor to the natives" in Africa in the title story of this stunning collection. He tried lithium and morphine, but they were nothing compared to the click of the hammer hitting the empty chamber of his .357. The short stories of Thorn Jones work in much the same way. Filled with an edgy rush of unknown possibility, they give survival a whole new meaning.
Jones's heroes are wonderfully realized. The prospect of death, whether in Africa or Vietnam or back home in Seattle or Los Angeles, fills them with a curious dread, intensifying life like a powerfully addictive drug. Ad Magic, the hero of "Quicksand," is a celebrated direct-mail wizard for Global Aid with a knack for turning tragedy into a philanthropic cause. Yet he is not well. He just escaped the massacres in Rwanda, and neither drugs nor reckless sex can save him from the malaise creeping into his soul (though they certainly do not hurt). Johnny Pushe, the fighter in "Dynamite Hands," may have lost to Tommy Wilde—the ref was on the take—but he is so energized by the fight that he knows he "can live the next three years off of that night."
Crazed, sometimes lonesome and decidedly macho, the world that Jones, who teaches at the Iowa Writers Workshop, creates in Cold Snap oozes adrenaline. By the time it hits your bloodstream, a safe and comfortable life never seemed so appealing. (Little, Brown, $19.95)
>George Fowler
FREE SPIRIT
"I walk around with a bull's-eye on my T-shirt," religious gadfly George Fowler, 66, says jokingly of living among evangelical fundamentalists in Nashville, where he and Lori, his wife of 25 years, have made their home since 1991. Even so, the former monk seems to take helping other spiritual seekers seriously. His syndicated weekly column, "Dear Monk," appears in more than a dozen papers, and he has recently hit the lecture circuit talking about self-actualization. "My life shows that it's all right to be neurotic as a start," he says. "It illustrates that a person can be royally screwed up and still come out okay."
What was hardest about life in the monastery?
It was probably that I was always questioning everything. For years I had awful self-doubt about my inability to just believe what I was told and shut up.
What would you say to the Pope if you had the opportunity?
I respect the old gentleman. He's 150 percent sincere, but I think he's absolutely mentally constipated because of the training he got in the seminary 60 years ago. He has undone a lot of the things that Vatican II got started in the right direction.
Do you consider yourself religious?
When I quit going to church I did not lose religion, I found it at a deeper level. Because I could not rely on externals—I have conformed, so my duty is done—I began to find it inside.
- Contributors:
- Pam Lambert,
- Sara Nelson,
- Marlene McCampbell,
- Ron Arias,
- Thomas Curwen.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
