Mortal Leap by MacDonald Harris
My rating: 4/5 cats
if you had said to me – “here karen, i have this book for you about a merchant marine and his grapplings with such untidy philosophical questions as the difference between selfhood and identity and how much of love is just self-deception,” i would have politely thanked you, and then put the book in that safe dark place with the red sweater with the teddy bear on it and the ceramic angel jewelry-box.
but, you read enough positive reviews of something, and it gets hard to not have your interest piqued.
i’m grateful for those reviews, and grateful to maureen for sending this to me in the “great mortal leap mailing-chain of 2012.” because this is indeed a good read.
raised in a mormon household, our antihero is accustomed to being denied certain pleasures. after a comical misunderstanding, he makes his great escape into the world, and discovers that the pleasures denied him by his faith are not that great after all. rather than using this revelation as an opportunity to cleave to the beliefs of his family, he instead settles for a life on the sea, where he exists in a basically anhedonic state until a combination of the war and an accident grants him the opportunity to start again as a new man with a wife and a history fortuitously supplied for him, plenty of friends, material possessions, money, and pleasures. while this new role is physically very comfortable, it invites psychological wariness and unease until he realizes if he is a fraud, so is everybody else. how freeing that is!
and it is marvelous.
man is basically an opportunistic beast. and even as we work our way through our narcissistic solipsism and our existential crises, we will take our opportunities where we can, no matter the cost. and it is horrifying, but it is true. untethered by love, loyalty, or commitments, man is like any other animal – survival, even in an emotional vacuum, will be the first priority. and for most beasts, that will be enough. until it isn’t.
and then the desire to leave a mark on the world; a legacy, will assert itself, and then the real fun begins. the anxiety and the sleepless nights and the finding a way to make life matter. and this book examines all of this and more.
much of the writing here is beautiful. i was going to type out all kinds of passages, but it just got to the point where i was making notes of pages i liked, and they were too numerous, and i thought that they wouldn’t make any sense out of context, so i basically just gave up on that plan.
try to find this book.
it is more than it appears.
