Uneasy Riders

By Paul Gray

LILA by Robert M. Pirsig; Bantam; 409 pages; $22.50

It has been 17 years since Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance went vroom-vroom into bookstores, and it has not stopped selling since. Millions of readers have followed Phaedrus, Robert M. Pirsig's enigmatic narrator-hero, on his physical journey through the American West and his inner trip toward a mystical understanding of the universe. Although it appeared in 1974, Zen was and remains one of the most impressive literary expressions of the countercultural '60s.

Phaedrus is back in Lila, Pirsig's second book, this time alone on a boat, wending his way leisurely down a water path that originated in Lake Superior and may bring him to Florida or even Mexico. He had hoped that all this free, undisturbed time would allow him to sort through the thousands of note cards he has assembled for his next book, tentatively titled Metaphysics of Quality or Metaphysics of Value. And this book, as Phaedrus describes it, sounds interesting: an attempt to find some middle path between scientists and mystics, between those who swear by facts alone and those who dismiss them as irrelevant. He believes there must be a direct conduit between the physical and the spiritual, and gropes toward an initial formulation: "All life is a migration of static patterns of quality toward Dynamic Quality."

The road toward coherence is clearly going to be long and demanding. But with his boat docked on the Hudson River, a hundred or so miles north of New York City, Phaedrus sees a woman in a bar and observes, "You just sort of felt instantly right away without having to think twice about it what it was she did best." Eventually, a good many drinks later, Lila Blewitt accompanies Phaedrus back to his boat for the night.

And she doesn't leave the morning after either. Although she is chiefly seen being grumpy and disagreeable, Lila strikes Phaedrus as a person of great mystery, a puzzle that his new way of looking at reality may be able to solve. He cuts back on his thoughts about his book and starts doing field research on one, overriding question: "Does Lila have Quality?"

Lila might work a lot better than it does if Phaedrus made this matter a little more interesting to the reader as well. But as this mismatched pair drifts southward, the skipper's attention is frequently distracted from Lila and his new project. For one thing, Phaedrus has come down with a bad case of EJS, or Erica Jong syndrome: the compulsion to write a second book dwelling on the fame one has achieved with a first book. "Sex and celebrity," he muses. "Before Phaedrus got his boat and cleared out of Minnesota he remembered ladies at parties coming over to rub up against him. A teenage girl squealing in ecstasy at one of his lectures."

For another, Phaedrus spends much time recording his perceptions of nearly everything he sees around him, and these insights often seem less original than he believes they are. During a stopover in Manhattan, he looks down from the balcony of his hotel room: ". . . YEEOW!! . . . Way down there the cars were like little ladybugs. They were yellow, most of them, and they crawled along slowly, just like bugs. The yellow ones must be taxis. They moved so slowly." So, for that matter, does Phaedrus' narrative pace. Far too much of Lila proceeds like this: "Then she came in the door. Sad. She was really looking old. She used to be a real looker. Getting fat too. Drinking too much beer. She always did like her beer. She better take care of herself."

Such passages will probably not bother members of the Pirsig cult. Gurus are supposed to talk funny and are always deeper than they seem. But the uninitiated may have a hard time making much sense out of Phaedrus' attempt "to go all the way back to fundamental meanings of what is meant by morality." At moments like this, Phaedrus resembles someone hacking away at a flat rock and wondering if he will come up with the wheel.