Snake Lake

September 6, 2010
Political drama in exotic Nepal is intruded upon by personal psychodrama in this feckless memoir. Journalist Greenwald (Shopping for Buddhas) spent the spring of 1990 reporting from Kathmandu as opposition to Nepal's repressive monarchy boiled over into violence. The setting offered Greenwald political adrenaline, lush atmospherics, romance and spirituality as he began a torrid affair with an expat photojournalist and took instruction from a Buddhist sage. (Sample teaching: " ‘the cause of samsara, of rebirth and suffering, is ego.' ") But the meltdown of his depressed brother Jordan drags him away just as the Nepalese revolution is heating up—and shunts the memoir into an odd portrait of American neurosis. Jordan is a mannered, haughty figure, a brilliant linguist who disdains popular culture, speaks in antique diction—"No man; no beast; no creature of the sea is as wretched as I"—and infuriates people by mimicking them; his hidden sexual dysfunction is the uninvolving mystery at the book's heart. Greenwald tells the story in novelistic style, with reams of verbatim dialogue, but the narrative's moving parts clash instead of resonating; they are like random detours on the author's rather callow spiritual journey.