|
 |
|
|
|
This is not fair.
Donald Miller, the author of Blue Like Jazz, hails from one of the coolest parts of the country (the Pacific Northwest – specifically Portland, Oregon), attended the school Princeton Review once called “the college where students are most likely to ignore God,” lives in intentional community, hangs out with protesters and beat poet look-alikes, attends a church with a cool Latin name, and writes a book that, according to its subtitle, is about “nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality.” He even puts cartoons in the book.
I, on the other hand, live in a small town in the Midwest, work at a school Princeton Review has cited as having the nation’s “least happy students” and “dorms like dungeons” (hey, maybe we should target Goth kids in our recruiting literature), know no protesters, hang out with a teen with Joey Ramone hair dyed blond, attend a boxy church with the words “faith” and “assembly” in the name, and still use old-fashioned terms like “Christianity” in my writing. Plus, I never put cartoons in my books.
Ergo, Donald Miller is cool and I am not. Ergo again, I shouldn’t be reviewing this book. Because I’ve always wanted to be cool, and cool people piss me off.
I suppose I should take solace in the fact that Miller wasn’t always cool. As he reveals early on in the memoiresque Blue Like Jazz (Thomas Nelson, 242 pages, including the cartoons), “I was born with a small bladder so I wet the bed till I was ten.” Ha! At least I was never a chronic bed-wetter. So there.
Even with such an embarrassing disclosure, Miller humanizes himself, makes himself vulnerable, which in itself is cool.
But on to the review. Blue Like Jazz is a self-indulgent examination of life, God, prayer, relationships, culture, the church, church subculture, and Christianity – oops! I mean Christian spirituality – that is insightful at times, rambling and disconnected at others. In other words, it’s a bit like jazz itself: improvisational.
Now, lest you think I’m being harsh with the self-indulgence rap, let’s hear from Miller himself on the subject. On page 181, he writes:
Living in community made me realize one of my faults: I was addicted to myself. All I thought about was myself. The only thing I really cared about was myself. I had very little concept of live, altruism, or sacrifice. I discovered that my mind is like a radio that picks up only one station, the one that plays me: K-DON, all Don, all the time.
Yes, Don, Blue Like Jazz is all about you. Thanks for admitting it. But reading all about you, annoying as it was at times, helped me learn a bit about me in the process. For I, too, have a similar character flaw.
Actually, Miller pegs me and my hangup about coolness on page 29:
Everybody wants to be fancy and new. Nobody wants to be themselves. I mean, maybe people want to be themselves, but they want to be different, with different clothes or shorter hair or less fat. It’s a fact. If there was a guy who just liked being himself and didn’t want to be anybody else, that guy would be the most different guy in the world and everybody would want to be him.
But enough about me. Back to Miller’s self-indulgence. (This review is all about him, after all.) Self-indulgence isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially for memoirists. Memoirs, by their very nature, must be self-indulgent. If you’re planning to write a memoir, you’d better have some interesting tales to tell on yourself – or at least have some interesting observations. Miller has both.
Moreover, consider our postmodern plight – and the world of publishing. One of the dramatic shifts from modernism to postmodernism has been the shift from objective to subjective, from scientific to experiential. The world of the postmodernist is one in which reality is perceived subjectively, and in which knowledge gained via personal experience counts for more than knowledge gained through objective study or the empirical method. So, the lessons passed on through Blue Like Jazz – Miller’s experiences running a “confessional” at agnostic Reed College’s Ren Fayre, for instance, or his observations from watching Nightline and discussing what he saw with Tony the Beat Poet – are more meaningful to the reader because they were “lived.” They were real. They really happened. Miller was there. He isn’t some mere scholar digging through musty journals or googling for data to support a thesis. Blue Like Jazz is the real thing, bub, straight from the source. (Miller does quote from C.S. Lewis once, to make a point. But don’t we all? It is as C.S. Lewis once wrote: “Those who understand the spirit of the Tao and who have been led by that spirit can modify it in directions which that spirit itself demands. Only they can know what those directions are.”1)
Even within the confines of a memoir, Miller approaches the subject of himself and his surroundings with a journalist’s keen eye for detail. His descriptions of friends, events and places are, for the most part, vivid and interesting. I say for the most part because there are the occasional lapses into stomach-turning GenX-speak. Case in point: “I live with four other guys, pretty cool guys in a pretty cool house in Laurehurst. I have this killer room upstairs.” Sounds like the editors at Nelson somehow incorporated posts from a college freshman’s weblog in with Miller’s manuscript.
Even when Miller’s on the verge of deep insight – as on page 107 when he writes that “the trouble with deep belief is that it costs something. And there is something inside me, some selfish beast of a subtle thing that doesn’t like the truth at all because it carries responsibility...” – he falls back on the crutches of GenX-speak by writing, “It is so, so cumbersome to believe anything. And it isn’t cool. I mean it’s cool in a Reality Bites, Welcome to Sarajevo, Amnesty International sense, but that is only as good as dreadlocks. Chicks dig it to a point, but you can’t be all about it.”
This writing style – this taking a bold stance one moment, then stepping back from it the next – is probably what irked me most about Blue Like Jazz. I’ll admit I’m not a big fan of the memoir, but that’s a personal preference. And I’ll admit I’m envious that my life isn’t as cool as Miller’s, but it’s cool enough for a guy in the Midwest. Casting all my bias aside, I recommend you read Blue Like Jazz if you want a glimpse into a postmodern mind. Don Miller is probably one of the emerging young voices of the emerging church. (Don, feel free to use that as a blurb on the sleeve of your next book, if you wish, but be sure your publicists replace “probably” with ellipses, like this: Don Miller is ... one of the emerging young voices of the emerging church. – Andrew Careaga, famous author.) So, if you can stomach the uncertain tone of the prose doubling back on itself, the frequent references to “cool” or “very cool,” occasional references to killer rooms and dreadlocks, then you might enjoy reading Blue Like Jazz. Don’t expect any easy answers, though. The book’s title, and the book itself, comes from the idea of jazz music, and jazz’s open-endedness.
“I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve,” Miller writes in the author’s note. But his perspective changed after watching a man playing sax outside a Portland club. Likewise, “I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve. But that was before any of this happened.”
So, like jazz – full of improvisation, discord and lyrical beauty, and devoid of resolve – Miller’s book simply is. You either like it or you don’t.
That may not be fair. But it’s cool.
1. C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1947, 1955), 59. This was the nearest Lewis book on my bookshelf at the time of this writing. This quote has nothing to do with this book review but merely serves to illustrate my point that we all quote from C.S. Lewis.
Andrew Careaga is a writer and pretends to be cool at his weblog, bloggedyblog.blogspot.com. He’s currently working on a book about punk music/culture and the church.
|
You put into words what I was feeling, but couldn't articulate without sounding plain pissed off. "This writing style – this taking a bold stance one moment, then stepping back from it the next – is probably what irked me most about Blue Like Jazz." Obviously he has had moments of epiphany, which I have gleaned and will apply appropriately. However, "coolness" is still too high on his list of priorities to truly live those epiphanies. There was an obvious undercurrent throughout the entire book, of that elite intellectualism that sits high on it's horse judging all those of a lesser mind. The lesser minds being those who weren't educated (and I use the term loosely) in the most extreme liberal Colleges. So much for tolerance.
|
|
|
|
(12)
You put into words what I was feeling, but couldn't articulate without sounding plain pissed off. "This writing style – this taking a bold stance one moment, then stepping back from it the next – is probably what irked me most about Blue Like Jazz." Obviously he has had moments of epiphany, which I have gleaned and will apply appropriately. However, "coolness" is still too high on his list of priorities to truly live those epiphanies. There was an obvious undercurrent throughout the entire book, of that elite intellectualism that sits high on it's horse judging all those of a lesser mind. The lesser minds being those who weren't educated (and I use the term loosely) in the most extreme liberal Colleges. So much for tolerance. Posted by Nae | Posted at 01/20/2007 8:47 AM