Word: phaedrus
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...road toward coherence is clearly going to be long and demanding. But with his boat docked on the Hudson River, a hundred or so miles north of New York City, Phaedrus sees a woman in a bar and observes, "You just sort of felt instantly right away without having to think twice about it what it was she did best." Eventually, a good many drinks later, Lila Blewitt accompanies Phaedrus back to his boat for the night...
...doesn't leave the morning after either. Although she is chiefly seen being grumpy and disagreeable, Lila strikes Phaedrus as a person of great mystery, a puzzle that his new way of looking at reality may be able to solve. He cuts back on his thoughts about his book and starts doing field research on one, overriding question: "Does Lila have Quality...
Lila might work a lot better than it does if Phaedrus made this matter a little more interesting to the reader as well. But as this mismatched pair drifts southward, the skipper's attention is frequently distracted from Lila and his new project. For one thing, Phaedrus has come down with a bad case of EJS, or Erica Jong syndrome: the compulsion to write a second book dwelling on the fame one has achieved with a first book. "Sex and celebrity," he muses. "Before Phaedrus got his boat and cleared out of Minnesota he remembered ladies at parties coming over...
...another, Phaedrus spends much time recording his perceptions of nearly everything he sees around him, and these insights often seem less original than he believes they are. During a stopover in Manhattan, he looks down from the balcony of his hotel room: ". . . YEEOW!! . . . Way down there the cars were like little ladybugs. They were yellow, most of them, and they crawled along slowly, just like bugs. The yellow ones must be taxis. They moved so slowly." So, for that matter, does Phaedrus' narrative pace. Far too much of Lila proceeds like this: "Then she came in the door...
Such passages will probably not bother members of the Pirsig cult. Gurus are supposed to talk funny and are always deeper than they seem. But the uninitiated may have a hard time making much sense out of Phaedrus' attempt "to go all the way back to fundamental meanings of what is meant by morality." At moments like this, Phaedrus resembles someone hacking away at a flat rock and wondering if he will come up with the wheel...