Gideon Lewis-Kraus has Daddy issues because his father, a rabbi, ditched his family to go live with his gym bunny boyfriend Brett. Gideon was nineteen, which is a little old to be an abandoned child but a good age to worry that his very existence stems from a miserable lie. At twenty-seven, he's still drifting and invites a Big Bro figure, the writer Tom Bissell, to walk the 420-mile circuit of the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. They use irony the way lame pilgrims used crutches -- constantly. And in place of Patrick Leigh Fermor's encyclopedic memory, they carry laptops. Endless emails ensue. Sometimes their new friendship falters. Critics say it's the best third of A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful [Kindle].
Later, Gideon makes a longer hike, alone, to the eighty-eight temples around the Japanese island Shikoku. The circuit is over 700 miles long and, apparently, this second section feels like it.
For the third part, Gideon invites his dad and his brother with him to make a Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage to the grave of Rebbe Nachman in the Ukraine. The WSJ claims "Gideon's father understands the symbolism but is ever on the lookout" for a gay hookup.
Two years ago, Gideon sent one hundred pages about that trip to Choire Sicha for the gay seal of approval and now Choire weighs the whole endeavor for Slate. I don't see how the book could be as trenchant and entertaining as his review, one paragraph of which is:
"There is something quite disturbing in the way in which Gideon writes about his father, who is a bundle of secrets and half-muttered truths and glancing drive-bys of information. This is Gideon's chief complaint about his father's behavior — but also the way that he chooses to inform us about the man. Because of this delivery method, the picture of his father is looming and monstrous but vague. He sketches a menacing Big Dad figure: He threw things, was capricious and prone to rage, was eccentric and frightening, was charming and hilarious but moreover unknowable in the way of fathers. What's striking is that Gideon was unable to lay this out more directly: He cannot bring himself to sit down and write direct pages to relay what kind of menace his father was, and how that changed over time. In part this was likely to protect his father and/but also this is a 6-year-old's depiction of a parent. (Five cents please!)"
A Sense of Direction rides the current vogue for walking books, with Damon Galgut's Booker finalist In a Strange Room
Ah, Lucy. Gideon sounds like several fathers I've read about recently, among them William Styron and Alison Bechdel's father.
Posted by: Jen_g | May 15, 2012 at 11:51 AM