April 6: Funny Girl, Elizabeth Gilbert, "Eat, Pray, Love," New Cartoon

She was a funny girl, old Jane.  I wouldn't exactly describe her as strictly beautiful.  She knocked me out, though.  She was sort of muckle-mouthed.  I mean when she was talking and she got excited about something, her mouth sort of went in about fifty different directions, her lips and all.  That killed me.  And she never really closed it all the way, her mouth.  It was always just a little bit open, especially when she got in her golf stance, or when she was reading a book.  She was always reading, and she read very good books.  She read a lot of poetry and all.  She was the only one, outside my family, that I ever showed Allie's baseball mitt to, with all the poems written on it.  She'd never met Allie or anything, because that was her first summer in Maine--before that, she went to Cape Cod--but I told her quite a lot about him.  She was interested in that kind of stuff.

Holden and Jane are the only two characters in The Catcher in the Rye who are identified as readers of really good books.  Holden reads books by authors like Isak Dinesen and his brother, D.B.; Jane reads poetry.  Holden has certain ideas about what makes good literature.  As I've said earlier, the mark or a good writer is that, "when you're done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."

A few years ago, everybody was reading a book by Elizabeth Gilbert.  Oprah did a show on it.  Julia Roberts starred in the film adaptation of it.  It was one of the best-loved and most-hated books of the time.  Even now, when this book is mentioned in conversation by "literary" folks, it's usually in pejorative terms.  For some reason, Elizabeth Gilbert's book has become the stereotype of the self-absorbed memoir.  Gilbert is a spoiled, privileged whiner, according to popular opinion.

Of course, the book is Eat, Pray, Love, and I'm writing this post to reclaim it.  I read it when it was first released, and I loved it.  The writing is vibrant and funny.  Gilbert's story is transformative and wise.  I think the reason the book got such a bad rap is that Gilbert seems to have such good luck.  I mean, she gives up the American dream--husband, home in the country, great career--and spends a year living in Italy, India, and Bali.  She eats a lot of good food, prays and meditates, and falls in love.  Basically, it's a book about blessings.

Putting all that aside, Elizabeth Gilbert is a hell of a writer.  Here is her description of eating the "best pizza in the world" in Naples:

...They have only two varieties of pizza here--regular and extra cheese.  None of this new age southern California olives-and-sun-dried-tomato wannabe pizza twaddle.  The dough, it takes me half my meal to figure out, tastes more like Indian nan than like any pizza dough I ever tried.  It's soft and chewy and yielding, but incredibly thin.  I always thought we only had two choices in our lives when it came to pizza crust--thin and crispy, or thick and doughy.  How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thin and doughy?  Holy of holies!  Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise...

Gilbert turns everything into a spiritual experience--food, prayer, and love.  If you haven't read Eat, Pray, Love yet, if you've avoided it because of all the negative hype, you need to give it a chance.  If you've read it before and fell into the trap of popular Gilbert hatred, tear the cover off the book and imagine you're reading something by an up-and-coming essayist.  You won't be disappointed.

Elizabeth Gilbert passes the Holden Caulfield author test.  She makes Saint Marty want to abandon his life and travel.  Maybe he'll go to Green Bay next weekend.

Confessions of Saint Marty