om love

August 20, 2012
An idyllic romance choreographed in yoga poses is the basis for this sophomoric novel from Minot (The Blue Bowl). Billy Winslow, a New York City artist whose career peaked in the â80s, now spends the majority of his time practicing yoga. As he tracks the downtown yoga studio RamAnanda through its incarnations in various venues, Billy falls in love with the beautiful yogi, Amanda. The chemistry between the two borders on nauseatingly perfect, until Amanda receives a devastating diagnosis and the relationship starts to fall apart. These romantic vicissitudes are played against the backdrop of turn of the millennium New York, with memories of the recent Dot-com bubble grimly countered by the sobering 9/11 attacks. Unfortunately, in Minot's hands these quintessentially American themes and experiences suffer from what Billy calls "wordpainting," a prose tactic wherein long strings of adjectives and nouns are linked together in order to create an impressionistic narrative that too often reads like fictionalized slam poetry. The result is something like a sermon delivered by a sex-obsessed Hare Krishna with the emotional sophistication of an adolescent boy.

August 1, 2012
Minot's second novel (The Blue Bowl, 2004) has a few too many twists for comfort. A strange love story begins in a New York City yoga studio, and quirky characters inexplicably float in and out. So does narrator Billy Winslow's ability to communicate his thoughts and actions in complete sentences. Billy, a once-popular artist and stream-of-consciousness thinker, finds the focus he so desperately needs when he joins RamAnanda yoga studio, but he expresses himself in an extremely unfocused manner: punctuating every word or sometimes every other word with a period or rambling on for pages using incoherent run-on sentences. Attracted to two women, the much younger Rose, and Amanda, a free-spirited studio employee, Billy finds himself more often in the company of Amanda. Between flashbacks of a weird Fourth-of-July incident from his youth and sweaty yoga workouts, Billy attends a dance with Amanda and eventually they move in together. When, midway through the book, Billy travels to California to be with his ailing father during his final days, Minot finally hits his stride. A genuinely emotional story emerges, and the author takes the reader on a profound journey uninterrupted by random punctuation and yoga terminology. Returning to New York, Billy faces an additional crisis, and, once again, Minot comes through with a well-written, poignant narrative; but sadly, it doesn't last. Rather than ending the story at a logical point, the author adds a couple of gratuitous twists to the plot. This uneven attempt may prove frustrating for readers who aren't yoga-savvy and who prefer their sentences replete with subjects and verbs, but Minot handles the emotional connections well.

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October 1, 2012

The East Village. The Nineties. Yoga class. Manhattanites getting healthy. Vegan bikers. Bodies posing. Downward-facing dog. Sexy, sweaty men and women. Amanda teaches, Billy learns. Love grows. Ommmmm. Reader, take a deep breath, practice patience. Minot's style--short, staccato phrases--may frustrate until you adjust, but you will be rewarded. In this audacious, courageous novel, the writer lays bare his soul, slashes his wrists, and bleeds out onto the page, creating a paean to love in all its selfish, selfless glory. Savor the breathtaking word picture of soul mates making love for the first time, a long, languid, sensual interlude. Accept the privilege of an invitation to bear witness as Billy's father achieves that most desirable transition, a "good" death. Wonder at Amanda's indifference to Billy's tender ministrations. Is it overwhelming to be loved with every fiber of another's being? Can the artist produce great work without the muse of great suffering? VERDICT More like a tone poem than a novel, Minot's (The Blue Bowl) disjointed narrative will draw you in against your will until you despair at the atmosphere of loss and longing yet revel in the emotional tug of the words. For your bravest readers.--Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst. Ft. Myers, FL

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