The Seeker Academy Bookblog

I have so far six Amazon.com reviews, none from people I’d met before the reviews were posted. One is from a reviewer on a social network thematically related to my book. Four men, two women; a romance novelist, a poet, two psychiatrists, a tech writer; one focuses on the story’s relationships, another its ideas. Chance starts to play a part, interesting juxtapositions to emerge.

One reviewer, a physician and professor of holistic medicine with a multi-decade practice, and an inveterate reader, reviewer and blogger, has the background to discuss the novel’s themes. As I read other of his reviews and his blog, I begin to want to know what he will think about my story. He writes this:

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

Recovering, Re-connecting and Re-Awakening: A Novel of Hope, May 27, 2007

By	Dr. Richard G. Petty (Atlanta) - See all my reviews

The book is deceptive. When I was asked if I would be interested in reviewing it, I expected a novel about holistic medicine and the spiritual path that I would polish off in an evening. Instead it has taken me three weeks to read. Not because it is badly written: far from it. After a slightly clumsy prologue, the book uses a story as a skeleton around which to wrap a careful examination of some very important ideas. Gussin is a very good writer and some of the prose and the images that they conjure up are luminous.

Grace is a forty-something woman whose twelve year-old niece has been going through the ups and downs of chemotherapy for leukemia. Grace is a former actress who is still acting her way through life. After the turmoil of her niece’s illness and days spent with other sick children, she is emotionally and spiritually drained. Not because of what has happened or what she has experienced, but rather that the events have uncovered a deep existential yearning.

So it is that she finds her way to the Seeker Academy, which could be any one of a hundred personal growth centers that I have visited. Here she meets an interesting and insightful group of people who are among the estimated thirty million Americans who describe themselves as spiritual seekers. The book does a superb job of describing the spiritual and emotional hunger of so many of us. How many of us have an uncomfortable feeling that there is something missing in our lives? That there is something important that we have all forgotten?

The characters have all brought their own emotional baggage, and amidst all the love and peace we still see people who can be mean and defend their positions and beliefs with religious fervor. Gussin captures the narcissism and spiritual elitism that can crop up amongst spiritual seekers and so disappoint people when they meet this world. There are the anti-science counter-culture folk who believe that to reason is to lie, and representatives of an array of beliefs and positions, including those who refuse any help from conventional medicine, even when in serious trouble. Grace samples classes, therapies and ideas like a person who is starving and stumbles into a five star restaurant.

There are discussions of Karma; survival after death; whether there is a purpose and a meaning to life that we sometimes miss because we have to focus on the mundane world; whether it is possible to have a spiritual life and to remain engaged in the material world; the advantages of controlling our reactions to, rather than escaping from the world; romanticism, reason and tragedy; the nature of reality and much more besides.

Grace learns at first hand how emotions can be stored in the body, and how skilled bodywork can release them. She also discovers that the seekers at the Academy are there for a dozen reasons. They are not just trying to heal some ill defined something, recover from trauma or find enlightenment. Most are just trying to re-connect with another human.

A car crash involving some of the characters sharpens the beliefs and actions of the cast, and leads into scenes where concepts and ideas are explored with rare intensity.

Gussin is clearly writing from experience. In the course of the book Grace discovers that real change is possible, and sometimes in a short space of time. But she then realizes that she no longer wants to change. She has a world to go back to. Yet despite her reluctance to change, it is giving nothing away to say that the experiences do change her beliefs and perceptions. Despite some of the difficulties that people bring with them to places like the Seeker Academy, for the person who arrives at the right time in his or her life, the experience can be life changing.

Teaching stories, parables and analogies have been used since the beginning of time, and in expert hands can be an extremely effective way of communicating difficult ideas. I have read some books in which characters discuss abstruse ideas and have sometimes come away scratching my head, thinking that even the most earnest angst-ridden undergraduates don’t talk like that! Gussin, though, succeeds very well indeed. The characters are lively, the ideas clear and the dialogue does not feel contrived. The format allows the author to talk about some complex and important ideas, without the formalism of a book about philosophy.

The best books, movies, articles and scientific papers do not give you all the answers, but make suggestions, challenge us and suggest new questions. More than once I saw parallels with the classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Both books suggest answers, challenge assumptions and pose a great many questions.

It was those questions that forced me to read the book far more slowly than I would normally. Despite the apparent certainties of some of the characters, the author does not pretend to have all the answers, and the book is the stronger for it.

If you are interested in some of the big questions in life, or if you feel that hunger that I described above, this is an excellent, well-written and engaging book.

Highly recommended.