THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 24, 1995 TAG: 9509210602
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL PEARSON
LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines
LOST IN PLACE
Growing up Absurd in Suburbia
MARK SALZMAN
Random House. 273 pp. $22.
There's a whole shelf full of memoirs in the library about growing up on the mean streets of the big cities; therefore, it's refreshing to read a story about growing up in, of all places, suburbia. My initial fear that Lost in Place would be a dull reflection on lawn mowing and car pooling disappeared with Mark Salzman's opening sentence: ``When I was 13 years old I saw my first kung fu movie, and before it ended I decided that the life of a wandering Zen monk was the life for me.''
The hint of self-deprecating humor nestled in that opening line eventually struts its stuff throughout Salzman's story. It's a very funny story in most places, the story of an odd young man. At least he is odd by the standards of the place the suburb, in this case, of Ridgefield, Conn. He is not a soccer enthusiast or a tennis player. He does have his enthusiasms, though. At first he wants to become an astronaut, but that interest is short-lived. In his quest to be a Zen monk he is more persevering, a mixture of Jack Benny, Siddhartha and Chuck Norris.
Salzman's story, his quest for identity through kung fu, is witty and original. He reminds me of the character in the movie ``Breaking Away'' who fell in love with Italian bike racing and then everything associated with Italians. Salzman is a skinny little kid in the suburbs who looks for his image in Bruce Lee, kung fu, Chinese philosophy and art, and finally in everything Chinese. What he finds is an intermittently inebriated sensei who is only slightly more aggressive than Steven Seagal and more depressed than Dostoyevski.
Along the way he gets to understand his wonderfully fatalistic and pessimistic star-gazing father. He becomes obsessed at intervals with Chinese painting, Indian music, the cello, marijuana, the existential malaise. And as he passes ``dazed and confused'' through junior high, high school and eventually Yale, he tells a story that is filled with laughter and good sense. He is able to remember what it was like to be and think like an adolescent:
``Adults tell you that school is not about learning particular facts, but about learning how to learn . . . And they're right. The problem for all of us as teenagers, unfortunately, is that until we find that special subject we have to take their word for it, and that's a lot to ask when you're talking about memorizing the Louisiana Purchase, the atomic weight of uranium or the plu-perfect-tense conjugation for verbs in other languages.'' Does anyone remember being a teenager and not pondering the same issue?
Memoirs are journeys back into a corner of someone's life. Mark Salzman's trip is funny and at times sad. It proves that growing up in the suburbs might not be any easier than growing up in the mythic urban jungle. Finally, it's growing up that's hard.
- MEMO: Michael Pearson teaches creative writing and literature at Old Dominion
University and is the author of ``Imagined Places: Journeys into
Literary America'' and ``A Place That's Known.'' by CNB