Books: Help from a Guru

GLIMPSE OF A STRANGER by Joe David Brown. 279 pages. Morrow. $5.95.

Mother India has played auntie to many orphaned spirits. Christopher Isherwood, the Beatles, Mia Sinatra: the list lengthens every year. The latest addition is Paul Fraser, the tall, blue-eyed New Yorker who is the troubled protagonist of this novel. At 46, Paul is a successful playwright and lover but, alas, a spiritual cipher. And after botching a suicide attempt, he drifts off to India—where Author Brown feels thoroughly at home.

An old pro in journalism (TIME) as well as fiction (Kings Go Forth. Stars in My Crown), Brown tells his tale in matter-of-fact, down-to-earth prose. But by the time Paul heads eastward, the least wary reader will know that the hero is in for a stiff bout of navel-gazing—and, almost surely, a religious experience that will change his existence. His guru is a holy man named Bhaiji who receives a mortal stab wound during a religious riot. And sure enough, just before his death, Bhaiji manages through his power to implant faith and purpose in Paul’s life.

Religious experience, the guru’s widow reminds Paul, “cannot be explained with words.” Still, novels are but words, and Brown makes a brave attempt at a nearly impossible task. Even that shrewd old storyteller, Somerset Maugham, chose to avoid a confrontation with the issue in The Razor’s Edge; his young American hero found self-transcendence in India, but Maugham never explained the religious experience itself.