Memoir of Lax '66 Well-Received
28 April 2010 Memoir of Lax '66 Well-Received
Eric Laxs new book, Faith, Interrupted, has received positive reviews in its first month on the market. Among others, the book and its author have been praised in the Los Angeles Times, The Globe and Mail (Canada) and, most recently, The Boston Globe.
The Los Angeles Times calls Lax a writer of gentle precision and clarity. The full review is available online.
Eric Lax has written a moving and illuminating account of his lifelong search for meaning, wrote Adrienne Clarkson, former governor-general of Canada, and a lifelong Anglican, for the Globe and Mail.
Lax graduated from Hobart College in 1966, majoring in English. At Hobart, Lax was a member of the swim team and active in several political and media activities. He was class secretary-treasurer and a film critic for the campus newspaper, radio station and humor magazine.
Following graduation, he joined the Peace Corps and served in the Caroline Islands in the Western Pacific. He returned to Washington, D.C., and worked as a Peace Corps fellow until he left in1971 to begin freelance writing. His books include Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking, On Being Funny, Life and Death on 10 West, The Mold in Dr. Floreys Coat, Woody Allen: A Biography, Paul Newman: A Biography, and Bogart. His articles have appeared in numerous magazines including The Atlantic, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and others. An officer of International PEN, he lives with his wife and their two sons in Los Angeles.
The full article from The Boston Globe follows.
The Boston Globe
Book Review
Probing the mystery of faith, found or lost
Judy Bolton-Fasman, Globe Correspondent April 28, 2010
I picked up journalist Eric Laxs heartfelt new memoir after reading his recent opinion piece in The New York Times in which he lovingly supported the controversial election of the Rev. Mary Glasspool, who is gay, as an assistant bishop in Los Angeles Episcopal Diocese.
Faith Interrupted is in part a longer reflection on the troubling paradoxes that confront a religiously observant life. Lax, the son of an Episcopal priest and the author of a well-known biography of Woody Allen, spent his childhood steeped in his familys faith, serving as an acolyte in his fathers Southern California church. Lax tenderly writes that at the altar we were like dance partners, each of whom knew the others steps before he made them.
In an age of dysfunctional family relationships, the Laxes stand out for their mutual love and respect even as Eric eventually abandons the religion of his childhood. Yet Faith Interrupted is such an honest and affecting memoir that one can imagine Lax wrote much of it in the same frame of mind in which he contemplated the night sky as a boy at Camp Stevens. The Episcopal camp, where his father served as chaplain, held memories of a first kiss as well as Gods surrounding grandeur. Lax writes that I felt particularly close to God as I drifted to sleep, and woke up in the morning thinking I would become a priest.
Lax attended Hobart College, a school affiliated with the Episcopal Church, on a generous scholarship. At Hobart he counted Jews among his closest friends and was influenced by Rabbi Hillels teaching that loving ones neighbor is the crux of the entire Torah. Lax was also struck by how closely Jesus and his disciples mirrored Hillels lessons. It was at this time that he also began to see his faith in a new and more complex light by trying to prove Gods existence through the works of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
At Hobart, Lax met George Skip Packard, who would become a lifelong friend and religious influence. Skips experiences in Vietnam, as well as his journey to the Episcopal priesthood, are very much a part of Laxs spiritual autobiography and take their rightful place in Faith Interrupted.
By the time Lax graduated from Hobart in 1966 he knew that he would go before his draft board as a conscientious objector. While Packard commanded a combat platoon in Vietnam, Lax initially deferred the draft by joining the Peace Corps, where he was a volunteer in Micronesia. Their experiences would challenge their faith in the vein of when bad things happen to good people.
Lax concedes that had it not been for the deep, painful, spiritual challenge brought on by the Vietnam War, I could well have continued to sail along in my contented belief.
In the end, Lax longs to reconcile with the god of Spinoza and Einstein. A god who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings. As he struggles with a de facto atheism, he takes comfort in the words his beloved and wise father once wrote to him: When and if we get to heaven, the honest Atheist will find that God will probably say, You were mistaken, but come in.
Later in Faith Interrupted, Lax quotes his longtime friend Allen on the subject: To you Im an atheist; to God, Im the loyal opposition. By the end, Lax has instead come to embrace a kind of faith in humanism, enabling him to stand up for Mary Glasspool and others hurt by misguided religious dogma and institutions.
Judy Bolton-Fasman is a columnist for the Jewish Advocate.