As an online-exclusive companion to our symposium on “the point of art,” which can found in the December/January issue, now available in print, we present this review of Martin Nakell’s Monk.

“Art,” Henry Miller once wrote, “is only a means to life.” Personally, I’ve always thought of art as the excrement of the soul, that which the soul leaves behind as it does its soul thing. What is that soul thing? I don’t know. If I did, I couldn’t tell you in words, because words—the ultimate artifact of human culture—are only the chemtrail of the soul’s flight to soul-thingness.

I don’t usually think about this stuff, because (1) thoughts are words waiting to be fully digested and often give me gas, and (2) I don’t know shit about shit.

But I read. And when I read Monk, by Martin Nakell, shit got real.

Is it fiction or non-fiction? Is it about him, a guy writing stuff down in his bedroom or in a coffee shop in a major American city, or is it the rambling notes of an itinerant monk somewhere in Asia at some time between Buddha and Armageddon? Or is the better question, as he asks in the book, “Where does the soul live in the house of a man who has no house?” 

Our Monk is filled with questions, and the answers are only more questions, so we walk a mandala through the particulars of each chapter as he goes from monastery to monastery trying to find—what, exactly? Nirvana? A girlfriend? A subject for a book about a Monk who searches for what, exactly?

As one of the Master Monks tells him early on, “Words are a great sea. Be careful you don’t drown in the sea you swim in.” But drown our Monk does. He drowns in snow, in music, in poetry, in Buddha, in Nirvana, in dreams, in breath, in sex, in his own juiced emotions. He’s a monk with a cock. He’s a monk with sense of humor and a sense of irony. He’s a monk who gets angry. “I’m angry at the ugliness of this world. At the suffering I see all around me… At lives wasted in wanting and never having. I’m angry with ignorance, with failure. I’m angry at the hatred the jealousy the ambition all around me even here in this monastery. I’m angry.” He’s a monk who gets frightened by his ego and confused by his teachers and frustrated at his inability to understand anything at all. He continually peels back the pages of words in his mind, only to reveal more onion. Language both delights and...