Customer Reviews

The Seeker Academy

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The book is deceptive. When I was asked if I would be interested in reviewing it, I expected a novel about holistic medicine and the spiritual path that I would polish off in an evening. Instead it has taken me three weeks to read. Not because it is badly written: far from it. After a slightly clumsy prologue, the book uses a story as a skeleton around which to wrap a careful examination of some very important ideas. Gussin is a very good writer and some of the prose and the images that they conjure up are luminous.

Grace is a forty-something woman whose twelve year-old niece has been going through the ups and downs of chemotherapy for leukemia. Grace is a former actress who is still acting her way through life. After the turmoil of her niece's illness and days spent with other sick children, she is emotionally and spiritually drained. Not because of what has happened or what she has experienced, but rather that the events have uncovered a deep existential yearning.

So it is that she finds her way to the Seeker Academy, which could be any one of a hundred personal growth centers that I have visited. Here she meets an interesting and insightful group of people who are among the estimated thirty million Americans who describe themselves as spiritual seekers. The book does a superb job of describing the spiritual and emotional hunger of so many of us. How many of us have an uncomfortable feeling that there is something missing in our lives? That there is something important that we have all forgotten?

The characters have all brought their own emotional baggage, and amidst all the love and peace we still see people who can be mean and defend their positions and beliefs with religious fervor. Gussin captures the narcissism and spiritual elitism that can crop up amongst spiritual seekers and so disappoint people when they meet this world. There are the anti-science counter-culture folk who believe that to reason is to lie, and representatives of an array of beliefs and positions, including those who refuse any help from conventional medicine, even when in serious trouble. Grace samples classes, therapies and ideas like a person who is starving and stumbles into a five star restaurant.

There are discussions of Karma; survival after death; whether there is a purpose and a meaning to life that we sometimes miss because we have to focus on the mundane world; whether it is possible to have a spiritual life and to remain engaged in the material world; the advantages of controlling our reactions to, rather than escaping from the world; romanticism, reason and tragedy; the nature of reality and much more besides.

Grace learns at first hand how emotions can be stored in the body, and how skilled bodywork can release them. She also discovers that the seekers at the Academy are there for a dozen reasons. They are not just trying to heal some ill defined something, recover from trauma or find enlightenment. Most are just trying to re-connect with another human.

A car crash involving some of the characters sharpens the beliefs and actions of the cast, and leads into scenes where concepts and ideas are explored with rare intensity.

Gussin is clearly writing from experience. In the course of the book Grace discovers that real change is possible, and sometimes in a short space of time. But she then realizes that she no longer wants to change. She has a world to go back to. Yet despite her reluctance to change, it is giving nothing away to say that the experiences do change her beliefs and perceptions. Despite some of the difficulties that people bring with them to places like the Seeker Academy, for the person who arrives at the right time in his or her life, the experience can be life changing.

Teaching stories, parables and analogies have been used since the beginning of time, and in expert hands can be an extremely effective way of communicating difficult ideas. I have read some books in which characters discuss abstruse ideas and have sometimes come away scratching my head, thinking that even the most earnest angst-ridden undergraduates don't talk like that! Gussin, though, succeeds very well indeed. The characters are lively, the ideas clear and the dialogue does not feel contrived. The format allows the author to talk about some complex and important ideas, without the formalism of a book about philosophy.

The best books, movies, articles and scientific papers do not give you all the answers, but make suggestions, challenge us and suggest new questions. More than once I saw parallels with the classic "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." Both books suggest answers, challenge assumptions and pose a great many questions.

It was those questions that forced me to read the book far more slowly than I would normally. Despite the apparent certainties of some of the characters, the author does not pretend to have all the answers, and the book is the stronger for it.

If you are interested in some of the big questions in life, or if you feel that hunger that I described above, this is an excellent, well-written and engaging book.

Highly recommended.

Yes, the characters in L. D. Gussin's "The Seeker Academy" are "hungry for the truth" as Christopher Noel says on the book's cover. But, these characters are even hungrier for connection,as symbolized by the Gorganzola-and-fig pizza at the book's beginning.

This hunger for connection extends in every direction. Their hunger grows vertically--into the world of the spirit (upward), and it extends into a wish for greater depth within themselves(inward and downward). The hunger grows horizontally and outward into relationships with romantic and married partners, family, friends, community, and casually encountered strangers. The masterful contribution of "The Seeker Academy" is laying these hungers for connection vulnerably bare and deftly showing the multitude of ways we human beings push and pull through,and often past, our desires. I frequently found myself pausing to make a mental note as I recognized a comment in the text that pointed to a tendency in myself.

From a writing craft standpoint, one of L.D. Gussin's greatest achievements is in his credible and warm fleshing out of leading lady Grace Hudson, and telling the story through her eyes. Grace, a middle-aged drama teacher in a middle school brings impeccable observation and a tendency toward wry mimicry into her roles as matron, mother, care-taking aunt, and then among the elders of the temporary staff at the Seeker Academy.

What better guide could we have into the culture of the Seeker Academy? ("Grace wanted to dismiss this coded talk.... But she also felt Sophie to be thoughtful and sincere.") Gussin doesn't go for satire, but neither does he go for whole-hog idolatry of New Age spiritual shopping. Very gently, Gussin reveals the wounding and natural human yearning that has drawn these people into the world of the Seeker Academy. Gussin also reveals, in a balanced way, the extent that this world of spiritual mélange delivers healing for wounds, and rapture for transcendental yearning--and to the extent it does not.

An amazing feature of The Seeker Academy is its encyclopedic knowledge of holistic healing and the history of spiritual seeking communities in America (since Thoreau, the Transcendentalists, and Chautauqua) and in Europe with the Romantics. Interwoven among the book's conversations and theatrical performances is a compendium and classification of New Age Philosophy. Make no mistake, Gussin has done a great deal of homework which undergirds The Seeker Academy. In addition to the broad swath, there is even practical, detailed information on how to perform sitting meditation.

Gussin's style in its slight formality, occasional sentence inversion, elegance, and wording of chapter titles reminds me pleasantly of the early 20th century books that crammed our bookcases when I was growing up in the 1950s and devoured books from an earlier generation. ("Grace knew that her body would ache the next day, as her heart ached from the winter in hell, but she was glad for the struggle.") There's a graciousness here that serves Gussin's tale well. I love the lyrical thread of poetic imagery that weaves through the book.

Grace Hudson lives up to her name, embodying as she does the quality of grace and carrying the surname of a great American river. Grace enters the Seeker Academy as a person willing "to give life a chance." Her "role-the-dice openness" helps her navigate the turbulent waves of her Seeker Academy experience with its not-yet-digested emotions and ideas.

Although Gussin's book is a novel of ideas, the relational strand of connection most compels me. The message I take away at the end of "The Seeker Academy" is that yes,"this life is a guesthouse" and in every moment we have the choice presented to us to be the decent human beings
we essentially are.

--Janet Grace Riehl, author Sightlines: A Poet's Diary

If you've been on a retreat of this type, you'll find this story in The
Seeker Academy familiar, riveting, intriguing.

If you haven't been on one, but wondered what it's like, and what the
people who go there are like, Gussin's novel is the next best thing.

The `hero' as she is referred to in the beginning, is Grace Hudson, who
probably would not refer to herself as such. She is a middle-aged,
warm-hearted wife, mother, and teacher, who takes the illness of her
niece very hard and seeks solace in a New Age spiritual retreat center.
She neither saves someone nor is saved; she simply experiences the many
classes and conversations offered at Seeker, and mulls over those
experiences.

At the start we're taken into an emotionally-charged and vividly described
children's hospital, seen through Aunt Grace's eyes. Shifting gears, we
are transported to summertime at a holistic retreat center, where we are
enveloped in an entirely different arena. Here we persevere with Grace as
she explores her sadness, her relationships, and her self, without knowing
what she's really looking for.

She is not the only seeker who does not know for what they seek. Her most
challenging task is to try not to think, but to simply experience. The
effort to not think, to just breathe, for example, leads Grace and her
friends to contemplate and discuss what they're not thinking about. But
what they're more interested in is connection with each other. Grace is
definitely not a loner, and likes to talk and share as much as she likes
to experience.

Appreciators of fine writing will enjoy the exceptionally crafted
sentences and overall structure of this novel. The writing is fastidious,
elegant, the descriptions lyrical, the dialogue superb in the opening
chapters, and intellectually stimulating later on.

Those who appreciate a history of the New Age movement and its
forerunners are also in for a treat: Gussin includes a great deal of
detail and background information.

And appreciators of holistic healing and new age communities will also
enjoy Gussin's penetrating observations and insights. Anyone who has been
to one will recognize him or herself or someone they know in these pages.
He is not sarcastic, nor is he affectionate: he offers us his clear,
dispassionate gaze as he unfolds his tale. No one is a caricature, nor is
anyone a hero. Ultimately each one seeks what we all do: to become
themselves - kind-hearted, helpful, healthy human beings.

Highly recommended.

The review's title is the last part of a relevant question posed some years ago by renowned literary critic Harold Bloom. As far as I remember, the question was something like this: In this age in which we can access so much information, where are we to find wisdom? I think it expresses the central subject of this timely book.

Grace is a fortysomething woman with a husband and an 11 year-old kid. She passes through an emotionally exhausting experience after weeks of worrying and taking care of her niece, sick with cancer. During the long, tiresome hours in the hospital, she gets in contact with other sick kids and their families. At some point, she discovers a deep anguish about life, sickness and death, and decides to take a break. Somehow she is informed of one Seeker Academy, where she expects to find some peace and think things over, in a new light.

The academy is a big rural estate where a very diverse array of people go to find answers to their deep questions. All sorts of "philosophies" and New age rituals take place there, from simple yoga to the most diverse "spiritual workshops", of the type "Get in touch with your inner self" or holistic movements. The kind of people who attend is easy to imagine: the bald, bearded, pony-tailed guy who plays the guitar in front of a fire; the rich, snobbish sixty-somethings, and so on. Grace engages in different activities, meets many people, thinks deeply, but somehow she feels disturbed, like something is missing. True, these people are sincerely searching for peace, for answers to the complex and stressing problems of life, but the atmosphere feels fake, empty. I can't give away the ending, but I can say that finally the experience is in fact not totally useless. The isolation from her everyday life, the opportunity to learn about these things, the chance to meet new and different people, leave her renewed, willing to look at her life in a different light.

This is not so much a novel, but the story serves as a vehicle to illustrate and reflect on extremely relevant issues for today and for the future: What is to be done before the apparently inevitable degeneration and decline of traditional institutionalized religions as a shelter and source of answers? How to deal with the agitation and the pressure posed by fear of old age, sickness, and death? Is there a life beyond the insatiable search for social success, money, things, and sexual satisfaction? Serious philosophy demands study, concentration, hard intellectual work, and above all time. And in the end you'll leave more puzzled than you entered, anyway. Scientific discoveries expand knowledge and understanding, but they tend to be more disturbing than comforting. So?

These book has the great merit of not trying to offer answers. That would go against its very spirit. But it does illustrate the current emotional state of societies, like the American, torn between contradictory impulses, who bring about only anguish and a feeling of emptiness. Books about self-help and spiritual healing are side by side with books about how to get instantly rich or have better orgasms. And many people read both. Certainly there are no ready-made answers. What seems to work for one person won't work for antoher. But maybe, just maybe, we could start by recovering common sense and appreciate the immense opportunities provided by our everyday lives, work, family, friends and intellectual interests. Maybe we should live in a way that promotes our having good memories. It may be little, but it's what there is.

In L. D. Gussin's novel THE SEEKER ACADEMY, Grace Hudson is a wife and mother who becomes overwhelmed while making many visits to the hospital to see her beloved twelve-year-old niece Alicia who has been diagnosed with leukemia. She comes face to face with the age-old dilemma of illness in children. Grace in her distress and pain--is she aptly named?-- leaves her family and goes for a three-week holistic retreat to Seeker Academy where she is inundated with classes on yoga, meditation, drumming, past-life regression, dance, tai chi, career guidance, Buddhism, tarot, and something Grace "summed up as 'gender-bending,'" etc. She meets many other people, many of whom are much younger than she and are from all over the world. Each person brings his or her own sorrow and disappointment to the academy; and while they make take different paths, they are earnest in what they are seeking. They are fleeing the greed of capitalism, escaping what the character Trumpeter calls "brainwashed society," the world of shopping malls, and seeking "deeper connections."

The fact that THE SEEKER ACADEMY is a novel of ideas presents the greatest challenge for the author. He must make these characters flesh and blood so that the novel does not degenerate into an extended essay on new age philosophy. Although if you aren't careful, you will get bogged down with all the talk-- you must read the novel slowly-- Mr. Gussin does manage to make most of the characters believable and sympathetic. Grace is completely likeable with her sometime skepticism as she comes in contact with so many different people and new ideas. Monk is one of my favorite characters. I even like the Golds--Anton and Deb, who at first seem caricatures and reminded me of a friend's description of Shirley MacLaine several years ago, that she had too much money and too much free time on her hands; but late in the novel we learn that they are at Seeker in part because of their unhappiness over a son who is not fulfilling his potential.

I am no authority on the holistic movement. From my limited knowledge of yoga, however, Mr. Gussin is right on point on that subject. I suspect that he has done his research in other areas as well. As a matter of fact, he lists sources in his acknowledgements. Having a character quote the beautiful poetry of Rumi is a nice touch as well.

Mr. Russin is good with words. The character Anton has a "layered smile." Grace sees herself in the rather Spartan atmosphere at the academy as having a "tented life." Gussin describes another character in one word as "cushiony." We know exactly what he means. Finally, in a scene near the end of the novel when Grace questions some of Trumpeter's beliefs, "I pulled a thread, she thought."

The novel asks more questions than it answers, but then there are no easy answers on how to live a life worth living.

When I started L.D. Gussin's new novel I somehow thought it was going to be a quick read, the stories of several newly introduced characters over a brief passage of Summer. However, I hadn't counted on the density of The Seeker Academy, of the conceptual underpinnings, the relations of the ideas to the characters in the book, and of the internal world of Grace, the middle-aged suburban protagonist of this sojourn in a New Age encampment of workshops for people looking for alternatives to the Western homogeneous monoculture. I found the book through an online spiritual community named Zaadz, and I kept reflecting as I read the book about the resonances between Zaadz and Seeker. The Academy is anything but homogeneous, is an intense experience for many there, and is full of differing opinions about what it is there for, which approaches to spiritual growth and healing are vital or important, what exactly the purpose of living might be. And some people are wounded, it's not clear where they fit in.

Grace comes to Seeker for a workshop on "Embracing Sadness," after several months, in which we're introduced to her, helping tend to her niece who's in a children's hospital struggling with leukemia that finally goes into remission. Intrigued by her experience of Seeker Academy during the workshop, she decides to stay on for a term working with the unpaid staff. As a perk for their free labor, the staff are allowed to participate in workshops and activities when they're not working, and we see Grace getting familiar and coming to grips with the Human Potential Movement, which is outside her prior experience. She's trying to understand what is really offered by all the different approaches to spiritual growth and healing, and along the way seeing how different people at the Academy, whom she's trying to categorize, meet what is offered there.

One of the things that I found both challenging and rewarding about the book was the complex interplay of ideas shared by multiple characters often conversing simultaneously. Each person speaks idiosyncratically, and it was sometimes difficult to wean out innuendos and meanings, and to keep up with how Grace is perceiving and processing her experiences of dialogs that the reader is experiencing for the first time with her. I found I really had to slow down and let the scenes come alive, rushing through them wasn't an option if I wanted to share Grace's journey. What Grace is living through her brief stay of less than three weeks is the heart of this novel, and I was a little surprised to find how much I was moved and was identifying with her hero's journey of self-discovery. She is very concerned that she finds herself unable to "believe" in spirituality in a sense deeper than openness to others and honesty with herself. None of the characters we're introduced to around her seem to have a clear experience of awakening to something truly transcendent of the world of form and time. One in particular, an older contemporary to Grace self-named Monk, clearly lives life on a deeper level, and is rigorously making an approach to honesty with himself and others at Seeker. But, in one of the key scenes in the book, a performance art piece he stages near the end of the book, he, though cutting through some of the comfortable illusions of Academy life, is unable to arrive at a value deeper for himself than reason, presented as a sharing of the perspectives of heart and mind, but mediated by what doesn't seem clear.

None-the-less, Grace's stay at the Seeker Academy is marked by a continuous poignancy as she reiterates her determination to respond to what she strongly intuits is something of great value it offers her, possibly something that can bring a meaning to her life that she wistfully senses has become lost in the routines of a suburbia which from the perspective of some of the characters is the dread enemy of authentic living. As she goes through her work routines, shared time with other staff, exploration of the grounds, moments of introspection, the qualities of her life quest shine forth. She needs somehow to internalize what she's experiencing, make it real enough that it has a chance of taking root in her life when she returns to her familiar roles as a wife, mother and middle-school drama teacher. She doesn't know if or how she can succeed in this, and I found her uncertainty, earnestness and hope deeply resonant and affecting.

The author has a blog for this novel [...]

Grace is coping with her relationships with her husband, her eleven-year old son, her brother, and her twelve-year old niece, Alicia, who is undergoing chemotherapy for leukemia. Stressed out by her efforts she goes off to the Seeker Academy for three weeks, and the book mainly concerns her conversations and encounters during her stay there. The format is rather like the novels of Thomas Love Peacock, or early Aldous Huxley, notably "Crome Yellow." The Seeker Academy is an upstate New York retreat devoted to such enterprises as yoga, shamanism, meditation, bongo drumming, chanting, holistic healing, mysticism, and all the others often grouped together as "New Age."
It is easy to poke fun at these things, and some of the satire directed at them has been crude (although I think Updike's "S." is brilliant) but I think that Gussin, although not entirely credulous, errs on the side of taking them too seriously. The dialog is crisp in the framing scenes, where Grace is with her family, but becomes sententious when the philosophers are allowed to pontificate. Aldous Huxley was able to insert abstruse ideas into natural-sounding conversations with a light but erudite touch.
It is well written and the author has a gift for vivid description of scenery and setting but I found some stretches more didactic than entertaining.. I think it would mainly be of interest to those already interested in New Age topics.

The Seeker Academy is a wonderfully detailed account of one person's journey on the path towards enlightenment. As other reviewers have said, this is not a book to be polished off in a weekend. It requires close examination and thought, since the concepts and ideas are highly complex and intricately structured. The dialogue is well-written and true to life, often reflecting the thought patterns that many of us experience. As such, it is often not as clear and concise as some might prefer. This statement is not a criticism, but rather indicative of the author's skill in putting the elements together. I found myself thinking about many of the discussions in the book, long after I put it down. This book is well worth the investment of the time that it takes to read it.

Grace is a common-sense high school teacher, weary from caring for relatives with cancer. On a summer break she becomes our mediator through a kaleidoscope of America's spiritual searchers at the Seeker Academy. The Academy itself is a mixture of retreat camp, community rec. center, and co-op mega-mall for multitudes of healing or spiritual arts, including African druming, past-life regression, psycho-drama, and gospel singing. Grace is new to all this, arriving as a sad, honest stranger. And this novel is a story of her slowly budding conversations which happen around the edges of the program. In such a venue I expected a cast of true believers pushing their wares. But the discussions here are questioning and tentative. The book's action turns around partly shared reflections. For example:

"'What turned me,' Sophie answered, 'was seeing the sadness all around. You may recall my lamenting my brother Jonas's sense of drift, especially given his rich imagination. Watching him fall into this gave me, at age fifteen, special glasses that made me think I saw behind all the smiles in the world.'

Sophie said this in a direct way, as if unaware of or unbothered by its hopeless sensitivity. Grace saw that her own attentive act had been useful, but she felt confused and also caught in a prior moment's smile. ..."

These characters raise questions or insights carefully. They walk lightly around big issues which loom in the air. While the book shows real ambition for spiritual adventure, each step is taken modestly. Slowly the Academy works its intended effect, somewhat like another Academy in old Athens. It is a place devoted to discussions that can make a difference, for both the unique participants and their struggling communities.

For those people who care about the eternal questions of life, this book, written with delicacy, strength, humor, and compassion, will be a wonderful guide and an emotionally satisfying read.
Larry Gussin is a writer of extraordinary power; his language has a compelling beauty that creates an atmosphere reminiscent of The Magic Mountain. At the same time, as with The Magic Mountain, Gussin tackles emotional and philosophical questions that many of us grapple with at some point in our lives, while helping us honor and accept the pain of facing questions that cannot be answered.