Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig (review)

Reviews 255 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. By Robert M. Pirsig. (William Morrow and Co., New York, 1974, 412 pp., $7.95.) The title of this book probably sold more copies than it should have. The words “Zen,” and “Motorcycle Maintenance” appeal to people who do not consciously think about ethics (the book’s sub-title is “An Inquiry into Values”), nor, perhaps, very well about either Zen or motorcycles. Also the title is slightly misleading. The central topic of the work is Quality, or what has traditionally been called the Good, and not Zen as a particular philosophy, or motorcycle maintenance. Pirsig, it should be said however, admits that it is not completely “factual” on either subject. Pirsig makes Quality known in two ways: by the narrator’s description of a motorcycle trip with his young son, Chris, across the U.S. to the West Coast, and with the story of Phaedrus, the narrator’s alter ego. While Phaedrus (“Wolf” in Greek) seeks Quality in philosophy, in thinking, the narrator tries to find it, in a more physical way, in relationship with his son, friends, motorcycle, and the land. Do they find it? Pirsig would probably say they do (his answer seems to be explicitly contained in the last para­ graph of the book), but he does not go so far as to say what Quality is. Quality exists, he says, but it cannot be “defined.” It is something found in individual actions, climbing a mountain “with no desire,” repairing a motor­ cycle, or explicating a treatise by Plato. It is peace of mind in doing something. Zen is probably a great book. The tone of the book is intense, and the story creates enough suspense to keep the reader reading. Its details, twen­ tieth century technology, educational theories and practices, cultural arti­ facts, roads, motels, etc., give it wide intelligibility to contemporary readers. But Pirsig is occasionally banal (such as in his discussion of Kant) and is sometimes ready to accept clichés about philosophers (such as in his com­ mentary on Aristotle). But such passages detract only slightly from the book’s timeless subject, its intense tone, and intelligible form. EUGENE WASHINGTON, Utah State University The Man Who Believed in the Code of the West. By George L. Voss. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975. 168 pages, $6.95.) Set in Flat Butte, Montana, just after the Civil War, George Voss’s first novel focuses on the adventures of Thaddeus Baldwin, an artistocratic, Harvard-educated Chicagoan who has come west to begin life as a rancher. Baldwin’s predicament is that he arrives armed only with a belief in the Code of the West, to wit, that fair play is honored above all, a notion he soon discovers to be more alive in the romantic fiction read in the East than in the realities of frontier life. ...