Of more immediate interest is a long 1981 letter from Pirsig to Robert Redford, who was interested in making a movie from this most unfilmable book. In the same vein, much of the Guidebook material is more difficult than the original, which has the energy and speed of a thriller. The master responded, 'Seven years.' The disciple asked, 'How long will it take if I try very, very hard?' The master responded, 'Fourteen years.' " "A disciple asked a Zen master how long it would take to gain enlightenment. Some of this material is dense enough to bring to mind an anecdote retold midway through. Morrow, the original publisher of Zen, is issuing in the fall a Guidebook to "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." Thomas Steele and Ronald DiSanto include some of the original reviews, excerpts from scholarly criticism, and a series of outtakes from the original manuscript, but most of their space is devoted to a close examination of the book's metaphysical underpinnings. Somewhere between a novel, a personal account and a textbook, Zen was compared by such highbrow admirers as George Steiner to Moby Dick. The only thing that didn't change was the appeal of the book, which describes the events leading up to the narrator's breakdown set against a cross-country motorcycle trip. Meanwhile, the author himself seemed to drift into seclusion.
In 16 years, there have been only two new works: a brief article in Esquire magazine on sailing, and a new afterword to a 10th anniversary edition of Zen, explaining the circumstances surrounding the 1980 murder of one of the book's pivotal characters, Pirsig's son Chris. In an interview with The Washington Post in 1974, shortly after publication of Zen, Pirsig talked about his upcoming projects: Them Pesky Redskins, a "look at the places where Indians and white cultures butt up against each other" Heresy and Insanity, "a comparison of activity among the people who pressed the Inquisition and psychiatrists" The Dialectics of Quality, "working out on a scholarly basis things posed in Zen." He was then 45, and he promised much: "At my point in life," he said, "it's all giving." And unlike such recent bestsellers as Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time or Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, there was never any dispute about whether the more than 5 million buyers of Pirsig's philosophical autobiography were also reading it. ROBERT PIRSIG's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance could lay claim to being the best-selling serious book of the last 20 years.
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