Strangest bestseller

Two kinds of people are apt to hate Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: advanced philosophy majors and advanced novel readers.

As a novel, Zen is terrible. Virtually no narrative, cardboard characters, and generally incompetent writing. But, as the reader very quickly discovers, this really isn't meant to be a piece of fiction in the traditional sense. Rather the novel form is used as an excuse to present philosophical ideas. Much as Plato presented his arguments through dialogues. Except Robert Pirsig's argument in Zen is almost exclusively with himself. In every chapter the central character (himself) stops the story of his motorcycle trip through the American Midwest with his son, usually only after a page or so, to talk directly to the reader at great length about how he developed his philosophy of Quality.

There is some story potential in the introduction of a mysterious character Phaedrus whose memory arises in the narrator's mind—but this turns out to be nothing more than Pirsig himself again, a persona he had taken on before a mental breakdown some years earlier. Then even the dramatic possibilities of this (a suppressed personality trying to take over the new "cured" one? a schizophrenic coming to terms with reality?) are spent as it becomes apparent Phaedrus is resurrected only as a mouthpiece for Pirsig's philosophical views.

And how about those ideas? Every now and then it seems a "novel" thin on literary values but heavy on a seemingly new message—usually of a heart-warming, stop-and-smell-the-roses nature—captures the public's fancy in a big way. A particularly lightweight example from the same era is 1970's Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

But Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, subtitled An Inquiry into Values, is a strange bestseller in this category. For the thought presented by Pirsig/Phaedrus is actually pretty heavy-duty. The kind of material you might actually study in undergraduate philosophy classes. In fact, the novel has become required reading in some introductory university programs. Several chapters do little more than gloss the views of ancient Greeks and the early modern philosophers like Hume and Kant.

As far as that goes it's not a bad thing. Trouble is that Pirsig goes on to present himself as having solved all the major issues raised in that history through his discovery of Quality as a kind of indefinable source of all ideas and things. Worse, the arguments he presents for this theory-of-everything are so weak they could be seen through by those same undergraduate students by the time they get to their sophomore or junior year.

In the end, recognizing the contradictions into which he falls, Pirsig retreats into mysticism, declaiming the truth of his supposed discoveries regardless of their failures. (In case you're wondering, the long-awaited sequel Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, which supposedly reorganizes the material into a more methodical Metaphysics of Quality, suffers the same weakness.)

Nonetheless, countless readers over the past three decades claim to have found life-changing insight in Zen. I suspect they are reading their own insights into this confused book.

— Eric