Remembering the ‘motorcycle’ man

Robert M Pirsig, whose philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance became a million-selling classic and cultural touchstone after more than 100 publishers turned it down, died at age 88.

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Pirsig’s publishing house, William Morrow, announced that he died at his home in South Berwick, Maine. He had been in failing health.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was published in 1974 and was based on a motorcycle trip Pirsig took in the late 1960s with his 12-year-old son, Chris.

Like a cult favourite from the 1950s, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the book’s path to the best-seller list was long and unlikely. It began as an essay he wrote after he and Chris rode from Minnesota to the Dakotas and grew to a manuscript of hundreds of thousands of words.

After the entire industry seemed to shun it, William Morrow took on the book, with editor James Landis writing at the time that he found it “brilliant beyond belief.”     

Pirsig’s novel was in part an ode to the motorcycle and how he saw the world so viscerally travelling on one, compared to the TV-like passivity of looking out at the window of a car. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ideally suited a generation’s yearning for the open road, quest for knowledge and skepticism of modern values, while also telling a personal story about a father and son relationship and the author’s struggles with schizophrenia.

A world traveller and former philosophy student, Pirsig would blend his life and learning, and East and West, into what he called the Metaphysics of Quality. The book was praised as a unique and masterful blend of narrative and philosophy and was compared to “Moby Dick” by New Yorker critic George Steiner, who wrote that Pirsig’s story “lodges in the mind as few recent novels have.” Writing in The New York Times, Edward Abbey was unsure how to categorize the book. Pirsig is survived by his wife, Wendy; son, Ted; daughter, Nell Peiken, and son-in-law, Matthew Peiken, along with three grandchildren. —AP