Mortal Leap

Dec 22, 2012 Jeffrey Keeten rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to Jeffrey by: Mike Puma

”You! You!” I shouted. “Pay attention, God damn it, now listen to me!”

Probably I was still drunk from the whiskey. I threw a crowbar, a heavy one; it soared end-over-end and vanished softly and invisibly like a bird.

“Listen! this is serious!” I yelled.

It wasn’t that there was nothing there. It was the silence was there, a physical presence, and wouldn’t answer. I wouldn’t have minded if there had been no God, then the universe would be empty and all things would be possible. But that HE should e...more

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Aug 11, 2012 Rod rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites, down-n-out, the-high-seas

Ever have one of those books that just sticks with you, and you find yourself thinking about it at random times for no particular reason? For me, this is one of those; it's attached itself to my cerebrum like a barnacle on the hull of a tramp steamer. Just looking at the cover provokes an emotional response in me, a powerful urge to delve into its pages once again. That cover. The stark monochrome; the hand-written script of the title; that strange, lonely, blurry face with the dark hollowed-out...more Ever have one of those books that just sticks with you, and you find yourself thinking about it at random times for no particular reason? For me, this is one of those; it's attached itself to my cerebrum like a barnacle on the hull of a tramp steamer. Just looking at the cover provokes an emotional response in me, a powerful urge to delve into its pages once again. That cover. The stark monochrome; the hand-written script of the title; that strange, lonely, blurry face with the dark hollowed-out eyes that could be sunglasses but look to me like two empty voids, like that horrific final image of Ray Milland in X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Oops, I hope I didn't spoil the ending for anybody that hasn't seen and was planning to watch that nearly fifty-year-old movie. Anyway, rarely does a book's cover evoke so well the contents within, and this is a perfect marriage.

The plot seems familiar, bearing a superficial resemblance to any number of movies, TV shows (Mad Men comes immediately to mind) and potboiler novels: A man takes on the identity of a dead man and has to learn to live life in the other man's shoes. Stop me if you've heard this one before. You've heard it before, but probably not done this well. Harris takes a tired old trope and manages to invest it with enough psychological realism to make it plausible and completely riveting.

We meet the narrator as a youngster living under a strict Mormon upbringing during the Depression. Once in his teens, always independent and aloof, he decides he's had all that he can take and runs away, drifting around and working odd jobs, eventually ending up as a merchant seaman on a rickety old freighter. There he befriends Victor, an old Russian ex-anarchist who teaches him how to survive in a harsh world--usually the hard way, i.e., taking advantage of him and screwing him over, you know, so maybe he'll learn a lesson and not be so stupid next time. Now, on the surface it seems crazy that a man would choose to be friends with someone that he doesn't trust and that has betrayed him on more than one occasion, but Victor doesn't trust anyone, either, so their bond is based on just a kind of mutually felt kinship and liking for one another, a mutually shared misanthropy. For some reason that really resonated with me, and the parts of the book portraying the narrator's and Victor's relationship are some of my very favorite parts of the novel.

The crux of the story occurs when the ship they are serving on is called on to deliver war munitions to the South Pacific and is attacked and sunk. Our narrator is rescued, but not before he is badly burned and near death. Awaking in a Navy hospital, his fingerprints seared off by burning engine fuel, his face burned temporarily beyond recognition, and no longer caring if he lives or dies, he capriciously decides to feign amnesia, discovering a certain freedom in having no identity. Unable to identify him, the hospital officials assume that he was an officer on the naval boat and question him in attempt to determine his identity, to no avail, until a woman shows up and claims him as her husband, Ben Davenant. Is she crazy? Very possibly, but he makes another capricious decision to simply play along and see where it takes him. The remainder of the novel concerns his struggle to forge his own identity while in the guise of someone else, and to possibly build a genuine relationship with this mysterious woman. It isn't a thriller/mystery as you might expect, but it nonetheless is an engrossing, stimulating read that has a way of getting under your skin.

This book's been out of print for probably a good four decades, which is a shame because it's terrific. Someone reissue this, stat.(less)

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Jun 18, 2012 karen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: distant-lands

if you had said to me - "here karen, i have this book for you about a merchant marine and his grapplings with such untidy philosophical questions as the difference between selfhood and identity and how much of love is just self-deception," i would have politely thanked you, and then put the book in that safe dark place with the red sweater with the teddy bear on it and the ceramic angel jewelery-box.

but, you read enough positive reviews of something, and it gets hard to not have your interest pi...more
if you had said to me - "here karen, i have this book for you about a merchant marine and his grapplings with such untidy philosophical questions as the difference between selfhood and identity and how much of love is just self-deception," i would have politely thanked you, and then put the book in that safe dark place with the red sweater with the teddy bear on it and the ceramic angel jewelery-box.

but, you read enough positive reviews of something, and it gets hard to not have your interest piqued.

i'm grateful for those reviews, and grateful to maureen for sending this to me in the "great mortal leap mailing-chain of 2012."because this is indeed a good read.

raised in a mormon household, our antihero is accustomed to being denied certain pleasures. after a comical misunderstanding, he makes his great escape into the world, and discovers that the pleasures denied him by his faith are not that great after all. rather than using this revelation as an opportunity to cleave to the beliefs of his family, he instead settles for a life on the sea, where he exists in a basically anhedonic state until a combination of the war and an accident grants him the opportunity to start again as a new man with a wife and a history fortuitously supplied for him, plenty of friends, material possessions, money, and pleasures. while this new role is physically very comfortable, it invites psychological wariness and unease until he realizes if he is a fraud, so is everybody else. how freeing that is!

and it is marvelous.

man is basically an opportunistic beast. and even as we work our way through our narcissistic solipsism and our existential crises, we will take our opportunities where we can, no matter the cost. and it is horrifying, but it is true. untethered by love,loyalty, or commitments, man is like any other animal - survival, even in an emotional vacuum, will be the first priority. and for most beasts, that will be enough. until it isn't.

and then the desire to leave a mark on the world; a legacy, will assert itself, and then the real fun begins. the anxiety and the sleepless nights and the finding a way to make life matter. and this book examines all of this and more.

much of the writing here is beautiful. i was going to type out all kinds of passages, but it just got to the point where i was making notes of pages i liked, and they were too numerous, and i thought that they wouldn't make any sense out of context, so i basically just gave up on that plan.

try to find this book.
it is more than it appears.(less)

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May 22, 2012 Maureen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to Maureen by: Rod

Shelves: somebody-awesome-mailed-this-to-me, 2012

i will never be able to say enough about mortal leap: the plot and its turns, the characterization, the relationships, and above all, the intelligence and heart that went into this book. this deeply resonant, erudite and accessible, sadly out-of-print novel is pointedly prefaced by a quote from pascal (pensées, vi:17):

He who loves a person on account of their beauty, does he love the person? No; for the small pox, which kills the beauty without killing the person, will destroy the love. And if o...more i will never be able to say enough about mortal leap: the plot and its turns, the characterization, the relationships, and above all, the intelligence and heart that went into this book. this deeply resonant, erudite and accessible, sadly out-of-print novel is pointedly prefaced by a quote from pascal (pensées, vi:17):

He who loves a person on account of their beauty, does he love the person? No; for the small pox, which kills the beauty without killing the person, will destroy the love. And if one loves me for my judgement, for my memory, does he love me? No; for I may lose those faculties without losing myself. Where, then is this ME, if it is neither in the body nor in the soul; and how love the body or the soul, except for these endowments, which are not what constitute the ME, since they are perishable? For could we love the substance of a person's soul abstractly, and without reference to its qualities? This is impossible, and would be unjust. One never loves the person then, but only the qualities.

it's heavy, i know. there's a lot to think about right there, before he even begins. but what's wonderful about mortal leap is that it's a very contemplative novel, yet it also manages to be witty, and quixotic, fraught, and surprising too, even when i think i know what to expect: the scenes in the solomon islands are very primal, still tying back to the overarching questions. And then there are the sly, off-the-cuff remarks where a doctor brings up bierce, or sweet little returns like the poplars coming back around, a connection that he couldn't shake.

i should say that rod found this treasure and recognized it as a novel so good that it could not languish in obscurity so he began to champion this book. and people began to listen. rod graciously mailed me the book. i read it once, then started again, having ordered a copy off the internet for myself, ready to pass rod's on to another friend (karen next, i think). i read the new copy, the third time through, and stuck sticky notes on what i thought were all crucial passages -- doubling its thickness with curled yellow feathers, that indicated sparks of pure insight, beautifully written passages in a intensely human, haunting and reflective novel.

after the third reading i took to just picking up on a random stickied page, and starting again. the jimmys (hi jimmy!) of the world are shuddering right now, a chill in their bones brought on by my brazen re-readings, my squanderings of time. but what's it all about anyway, right? and mortal leap was so full of thoughts that i wanted to think about, that i began to despair of doing it justice in a review. and yet, it is a grand book, and i think, an important one, and so demands that i give it its due. for we are all flitcrafts and prufrocks, and we know larry backus and ben davenant, inside our beautiful padded cells, these skins containing jumbles. i was preoccupied by the turns in this book, the cleanly written account of the life of a man who takes on another man's life, who remakes himself. the pseudonymous macdonald harris has an extraordinary style: his protagonist is disarming from the first, companionably explaining that he doesn't have any answers to the question "who am i?" but certainly has thought a lot about it. but let him put it plainly:

Who doesn't have a dark place somewhere inside him that comes out sometimes when he's looking in a mirror? Dark and light, we are all made out of shadows like the shapes on a motion-picture screen. A lot of people think that the function of the projector is to throw light onto the screen, just as the function of the story-telling is to stop fooling around and simply tell what happened, but the dark places must be there too, because without the dark places there would be no image and the figure on the screen would not exist. Fine, let's look at the dark places. To do this we have to roll the film back to a previous incarnation of myself: I am twenty-five years old, looking the same as I do now except a little thinner and more cocky, without the scars and the furrow between the eyes. In this somewhat faded photograph I am wearing a dirty cap with gold braid on it, the third engineer of a ship which through a piece of stupidity was sunk in the Solomon Islands in the fall of 1942. It was an event of no particular military or historical importance; a merchant ship had no business being in that part of the world in the first place and that was the year they were getting the gas oven into high gear at Auschwitz. What possible significance can be attached to any individual fate, the things that happen to any single collection of bones, ligaments, reflexes, sensations in a time when six million people were exterminated according to the latest scientific methods? It was not an important agony, looked at objectively. What happened was simple, even banal: I became naked, died, lost parts of my flesh and most of my ego along with a few illusions such as a belief in the uniqueness of my personal scrap of consciousness and the cosmic importance there of, and went from there. All that was left was something inside that I don't know what call -- a soul? Even the theologians don't believe in that anymore. Maybe it's better to believe in ghosts.

that's just the second page. the second page!! it's a classically modelled text: the author states the intentions of the novel quite plainly at the beginning, a precis communicated so companionably, immediately trusting the reader so implicitly, embracing them in an everyman voice that is remarkably real. we are all in this together, he assures us, not just trying to understand the question "who am i?" but also, "to what purpose"? for consciousness can be a trap, and self-awareness only makes us realize that we are stuck inside our own head, alone, undefined, struggling to figure out who the hell we are, what our places are, and what we mean in the grand scheme of things. capital "p" Purpose, plagues us. but for people like our man in the mirror, the protagonist (who really succeeds in shucking his name), that Purpose is easily found, and that's where I found this novel a little hard to accept, and a little too convenient a beam, the bar before the book's eponymous moment. and the purpose he finds, it's not what i am looking for -- i cannot reconcile to it, though i know it is a way that works for others. and so i dwell over the flurry of flagged passages of this book that resonate, trying to figure what i can take away to build on, because so much appeals to me in this thinking, as i continue to look for the answers, for the beam falling, for the bar before the mortal leap -- the description of which i was very tempted to transcribe here (i wanted to transcribe so much!), except that is arguably the zenith of this novel, of the wisdom it relays, and so please seek it out, and read for yourself. :)

** i would love to talk more about mortal leap: maybe i should post a thread in the fiction files, and link to it here, so here's the link: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/9... i tried not to put any spoilers in this review, but i think there are a bazillion in my comments already anyway. you are forewarned!:P(less)

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Apr 18, 2012 brian rated it 4 of 5 stars

it's every booknerd's dream to find an unknown & outta print book that rocks his/her world. well, booknerd, get your cock (or some such other corporeal appendage) in here quick, b/c i suspect pretty soon this book ain't gonna be all that unknown.

as a kid i was always turned off by the too-cool-for-school guys, those fonzified turdfucks who felt it cool to act casual about everything. oh, fuck that. i'm one easily enthused jackass and i'd have it no other way. back then, those guys who talke...more it's every booknerd's dream to find an unknown & outta print book that rocks his/her world. well, booknerd, get your cock (or some such other corporeal appendage) in here quick, b/c i suspect pretty soon this book ain't gonna be all that unknown.

as a kid i was always turned off by the too-cool-for-school guys, those fonzified turdfucks who felt it cool to act casual about everything. oh, fuck that. i'm one easily enthused jackass and i'd have it no other way. back then, those guys who talked very casually about banging some chick (whereas for me, every single time a girl reached back, unsnapped her bra, and new breasts tumbled out, it was like they (the breasts, that is) socked me in the gut. it was magical lifestuff which always left me breathless and mystified. every time.) are the same dicks who now, in our late 30s, hate their fucking jobs, wives, kids, and spend their weekends eating steak and watching football. yuk. and mortal leap kinda takes on all this kinda stuff in its quest to understand the meaning of 'identity' and how it relates, really, to what and who we are on the inside. are we merely a composite of all we've ever done? of all we wanna do? all that's been done to us? or is it something more mystical? or something way more simple? tough stuff to figure out. macdonald harris takes a fantastic crack at it.

mortal leap concerns a taciturn chap who leaves his uptight mormon family to become a merchant marine who engages in a whole lotta rather un-mormonlike activity: harddrinking, whorebanging, cardplaying, dealmaking, lifeliving, etc. well, during WW2 he takes on the identity of a fallen soldier (NOT don draper) and pretty seamlessly slips into a new life. as y'might imagine the whole thing's just on the brink of slipping into the wannabe-tough-guy hard-living territory, and it would, if not for the latter half of the book. y'see, macdonald harris sets up all that bukowski crap only to tear it down. what mortal leap is really all about is the will to live, to really live: to stop playing it cool and taciturn and to howl, madly, into the abyss, to put it all on the line, to act like a jackass and kick against the pricks and make one's mark in the world. here's how harris puts it:

"the important thing was that being alive was all there was, and the more deeply you could savor and know things, the roughness of the sand or the smell of the rain or making love, the more fully you were alive."

mortal leap's first and last printing was in 1964.
considering all the utter crap that's been foisted on the reading public over the years, i find this damn near criminal.

"We move blindly toward our sins, and the things we do and the things we suffer for don't have much to do with one each other. In the end there's no justice: the universe is not an auditing firm. Would we like it better if it were? If we had to pay for everything, down to the last cruelty, the last fornication, the last harmless lie? Let's leave the dark places where they are." - from mortal leap(less)

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Apr 09, 2012 Proustitute rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: american-literature, 2012

Harris's dissection of what constitutes the self is very interesting here, pitted against a story of adventure and intrigue on the sea and its port counterpart. Philosophy, existential crises of individuality and subjectivity, and the gritty cinematic noir-meets-Conrad atmosphere in this book are wonderfully executed. It's a shame that Harris is virtually unknown: this is a title a publisher like NYRB should bring back into print to shed more light on Harris's work.

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Nov 02, 2012 Les rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: EVERYONE

Recommended to Les by: Dorks and Those who know them

Shelves: favorites, readagainable, philosophy, wishlist, mr-novembers-fall-to-remember, not-enough-stars-in-the-sky

I am a lazy reviewer and wish to change that by actually reviewing some of the books I read. It should start with this one, but time does not permit it at the moment. So, a promised review soon.

In the meantime, I can give no better recommendation for Mortal Leap than adding it to my Essential list (consider it my 6 star or the best of my favorites). It IS that good.

"I had no objection to facts and labels in principle. Let them find out the facts, let them write labels all day if it gave them ple...more I am a lazy reviewer and wish to change that by actually reviewing some of the books I read. It should start with this one, but time does not permit it at the moment. So, a promised review soon.

In the meantime, I can give no better recommendation for Mortal Leap than adding it to my Essential list (consider it my 6 star or the best of my favorites). It IS that good.

"I had no objection to facts and labels in principle. Let them find out the facts, let them write labels all day if it gave them pleasure. I had no facts to give them, that was all. I had stopped believing in facts the way an atheist stops believing in God. I was in the water and then it had all been burned away--past, ego, identity, memory. There was something left, evidently. Something was thinking. But what?"

. . .

"Most people believed in a body and also in a soul, or whatever you wanted to call it, an ego. But it was more complicated than they thought. They thought of the ego as a kind of foggy pear-shaped essence inside you that stayed the same no matter what happened to the body: aware of other people and different from them, knowing its name, preferring coffee with cream, disliking warm beer. It didn't matter what you did with your body, tattooed yourself blue, became a hashish addict or fell into a sausage machine, you were still you and inside there was an unconquerable soul that went marching on. All this was probably true and I had had an ego like that once too. But what they couldn't get through their heads, Baroni and the others with clipboards and their questions, was that this part of me had been burned away too that night in the water. They thought the burns were only third degree (charred skin, some tissue damage) but they had gone deeper than that. Or perhaps my ego had been closer to the surface than most people's, out in the skin where the fire could burn it away. Anyhow it was gone, disappeared with the fingerprints that had slid off on the hot metal and dissolved in the sea.
P. 130

P. 40
"He meant everything, the money, my rage, the agony of the sausage-eater in Odessa. Doubled up with pain on the floor of the cabin I saw he was right, and I had been wrestling with the wrong person. It was a part of myself that was my enemy; I still had a childish illusion that the flesh on my own bones was somehow unique and precious to the universe, in some obscure corner of my mind I wanted others to love me and make exceptions for me simply because I felt heat and cold, pain and loneliness as they did. Now this was gone once and for all, and I understood there were no exceptions and no one was invulnerable, we all had to share the same conditions and in the end this was simply mortality, the mortality of things as well as ourselves. After that I didn't expect anybody to love me and I understood why Victor kept his money taped to his chest. I got up off the floor impassively and went away without a word. Victor didn't give me back my money, and neither of us ever mentioned the subject again."

Damn.(less)

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Aug 24, 2012 Gloria rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

"The resentment I felt inside was not hatred for being imprisoned or for Victor who had betrayed me but something deeper: a rebellion against the very way of things that condemned men to be imprisoned inside their own identities."

Larry doesn't really know who he is. He simply knows that his whole life he's been battling and fighting against how his current environment has defined him.
Until he's given a rare opportunity.
Plucked from the sea amidst the burning wreckage of a sunken Naval ship, inju...more

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Jun 30, 2012 Greg rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

As of 6/30/12 at 10:53 am EST, no one on goodreads.com has rated this book who isn't a friend of mine. This is a little weird. It's becoming something of a cult favorite among the little speck of the goodreads world I move about in.

I'm not positive but I think this all started with Brian reading the book, and then him and Kowalski spooging on the internets about it. And then apparently a copy started floating around, I think stemming from Rod, that is making the rounds among people. I'm only coo...more

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Aug 09, 2012 Daniel rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

I’ve been afraid of writing this review because I know I’m not a good writer, and I want to find the words to express how I feel about Mortal Leap, but I realize I can’t ever really find the perfect way to describe this book, so why bother, right? But I guess that is what this book is really about, not some idiot trying to write a book review, but taking the “leap” into the unknown and trusting that you will find yourself, or whatever it is you are looking for, on the other side. Let’s see if I...more I’ve been afraid of writing this review because I know I’m not a good writer, and I want to find the words to express how I feel about Mortal Leap, but I realize I can’t ever really find the perfect way to describe this book, so why bother, right? But I guess that is what this book is really about, not some idiot trying to write a book review, but taking the “leap” into the unknown and trusting that you will find yourself, or whatever it is you are looking for, on the other side. Let’s see if I have found myself at the end of this review.

I think what I noticed most about this book is similar to what Ben Loory says in his review: that this book calmly meanders its way to its end. This book appears aimless as its protagonist, “Ben,” abandons his Mormon childhood, becomes a merchant, gets arrested, becomes shipwrecked, loses his identity, etc. But it’s not loose and unstructured, Harris is just not anxious to show everything up front. Rather, he has certain ideas running through the whole book. I marked in my notebook something that struck me when first reading it: on page 112, after a crucial moment in his moral development, our protagonist concludes, “Well, it’s better not to look in mirrors.” What impressed me was that this continues a thought he has on page 2, 110 pages earlier. (Note: I no longer have the book, so I can’t double check this.) What interests me even more is that I am not sure that the protagonist would even agree with such a statement by the end of the book. He becomes so many different people in the course of the story, and many of his developments are steps in the wrong direction and will need to be undone by the end. This faux-messiness is probably what makes this book so interesting, plot-wise.

But it’s this inability to look at one’s self that really struck me. It turns out that Ben’s habit of making life changing decisions quite rashly is not just a way to rid the parts of himself he dislikes, it’s a way of jumping into something entirely new in order to find a self that is in some way truer. He hates himself. He wants to run away from love and the burden of having a self, but cannot. Ben is given a chance to actually rid himself entirely of everything that he was, which is still fascinating even though I’ve seen the first season of Mad Men, and yet one wonders if such a thing is ever possible. Can Ben actually hide his past from his new life? And if he pretends somewhat successfully, is he really rid of it?

Look, to wrap it up, this book is refreshing. It’s an adventure story without the fast pacing, it’s philosophy with a plot, and it’s all completely compelling. Read the damn thing, you’ll get street cred because it’s out of print.

(And look, there I am! I found out that I am totally and only interested in what people think of me! Maybe I’ll run away from home and see if that changes. Thanks, Mortal Leap!)

PS. I suggested this title to be picked up by New York Review of Books for a reprint. Perhaps if we all go to their website and do the same, it’ll happen!(less)

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Aug 09, 2012 Ben Loory rated it 5 of 5 stars

this book came so highly recommended i almost didn't want to read it, i figured it couldn't possibly live up to the hype. but it did, and in a nice way-- a calm, quiet, sure way. i think i expected a lot of fireworks or something. instead, this book struck me as something of a dead breed. it kinda reminded me of john marquand's Point of No Return. it's a wise book, without being some kind of alchemist-type thing where all the secrets of the universe are supposedly explained. it made me realize h...more

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Jul 01, 2012 Neglectedbooks rated it 4 of 5 stars

Mortal Leap tells a story it seems as if we’ve seen on TV a dozen times: a man takes on another’s identity, abandoning his own, and lives out a new life. But have we?

There are plenty of stories of mistaken identity, and plenty more, like the Kevin Kline comedy, “Dave”, where one person pretends to be another (in that case, the President of the United States) to deceive others. In Mortal Leap, however, we are led, with careful attention to detail, motivation, and effect, through a man’s decision...more Mortal Leap tells a story it seems as if we’ve seen on TV a dozen times: a man takes on another’s identity, abandoning his own, and lives out a new life. But have we?

There are plenty of stories of mistaken identity, and plenty more, like the Kevin Kline comedy, “Dave”, where one person pretends to be another (in that case, the President of the United States) to deceive others. In Mortal Leap, however, we are led, with careful attention to detail, motivation, and effect, through a man’s decision to utterly abandon the life he’s lived, the person he’s become in twenty-some years since birth, and become another man. Another man with a history, possessions, relationships, traits, habits. Another man with a wife, a family, a life already being lived. Have we ever really heard this story before?

In this book, his second novel, MacDonald Harris takes us, as if in freeze-frame, through a salto mortale–literally, a mortal leap–the circus acrobat’s mid-air vault from one trapeze to another. We follow the nameless protagonist as he swings back and forth through a life as a merchant seaman in the 1930s and early 1940s.

His freighter is sent to take a load of fuel and supplies to a nameless southwest Pacific island–probably Guadalcanal. Ambushed along with its escort by a group of Japanese ships, the ship is hit and sunk. The man survives and makes it to an unhabited atoll, but in his attempt to get off the island, he is caught in a naval battle and severely burned.

From the circumstances of his rescue, his apparent age and physical features, Navy investigators finally speculate that the man is Lieutenant Ben Davenant, an officer on the U.S.S. Marcus, one of the ships lost in the night battle. They send a photo of the man’s scarred face to Davenant’s parents, who do not recognize him. Davenant’s wife, however, comes to Hawaii to see for herself.

The man still has no intention of doing anything, of merely plunging forward into oblivion. But then the wife comes into the hospital room and another trapeze appears before him:

"A moment later she was bending over the bed and I felt the light touch of her lips on my forehead; I caught an elusive scent of linen and perfume. Even then I was not fully awake. And yet in those few seconds when everything hung on a knife edge I committed myself by my silence. I felt words forming in my mouth, but I couldn’t arrange them properly; the time passed when I might have spoken and still I said nothing."

One could say that the salto mortale analogy–which Harris himself introduces later in the book–misses the point somewhat. The man doesn’t grab for the other bar. He merely says nothing–he allows the woman to say that he is Davenant. And at first, though he goes along with the deceit, he’s in many ways just as passive as he was in free fall. Ary, the wife, takes charge. She gets them back to the U.S., arranges for man/Davenant’s discharge, and settles them in her father’s large seaside house in Laguna Beach.

Becoming another person, as Harris shows us, is much harder than it ever seems in the movies. There are so many little practical hurdles. The man, after all, was a rough merchant sailor before, and now he is in the midst of a wealthy, cultured family. He has to learn not to dig wax out of his ear with his pinky, not to ask for ketchup when eating a steak, how to mix a cocktail.

I first read Mortal Leap almost thirty years ago, and I remember how the narrative seized my attention. It was one of those books you begrudge the rest of your life for taking you away from. When you don’t know how it’s going to turn out, you feel as if you are hurtling forward along with the protagonist.

When I reread the book recently, it seemed even more powerful and affecting. I knew how it would turn out, but now the suspense was in seeing how Harris could make it plausible. What I saw this time around was how he manages to make this wildly improbable situation into a very basic lesson about being. So the man learns how to imitate Ben Davenant without getting caught–or at least, so he thinks. The man has made the leap and a new bar is in his hands. But he still has to confront the question, “Now what?”

Read more at http://neglectedbooks.com/?p=206.(less)

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Apr 24, 2012 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to David by: Rod

You know what's depressing? Don't worry. I'll tell you. There was this guy named MacDonald Harris (who apparently looked a little like the lead singer of Midnight Oil), and this MacDonald Harris guy wrote a novel in the 1960s called Mortal Leap that was a good deal better than many of the 24k gold-plated tomes that have since ascended into the pantheon of canonical literature (to the accompaniment of Handel's Messiah and an overactive fog machine, no doubt). But that novel, good as it was, quick...more You know what's depressing? Don't worry. I'll tell you. There was this guy named MacDonald Harris (who apparently looked a little like the lead singer of Midnight Oil), and this MacDonald Harris guy wrote a novel in the 1960s called Mortal Leap that was a good deal better than many of the 24k gold-plated tomes that have since ascended into the pantheon of canonical literature (to the accompaniment of Handel's Messiah and an overactive fog machine, no doubt). But that novel, good as it was, quickly went out of print and was forgotten, and probably earned fewer critical mentions in its day than Snooki's autobiography.

So do you see what can happen? Either by sheer talent or hard work [or an amalgam of the two], a guy shits out a really great book—something that, statistically speaking, not many people accomplish in their lifetimes—and then nothing at all happens with it. It doesn't even get a second printing, for Chrissake.

So there's this to consider: that even if you happen to excel at whatever it is you do, maybe nobody will ever even notice. So it's almost like you did nothing with your life at all. You might just as well have sat on your ass all those years eating Cheetos and watching reruns of Hoarders on Netflix. I mean, if a book falls into the Bargain Book section at B&N and there's nobody there to read it, does it really even exist at all? I'll leave that one for the philosophers.

Well, here's a little good news... People are starting to notice Mortal Leap. They're realizing that it's a great little American novel about human identity that shuttles deftly between narrative intensity and ruminative insight—so much so that I'm not really sure which it does better. But the bad news nevertheless continues to reassert itself: MacDonald Harris is conspicuously and resolutely dead—and is therefore unable to enjoy any prospective revitalization of his career.

I guess if you believe that any reader's appreciation of his work is a (quasispiritual) validation of Harris's labors, even after his death, then maybe this offers some half-assed consolation. But I happen to think it's a total fucking ripoff.

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Jul 17, 2012 Mike Puma rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: men and/or women

Shelves: 2012

I’m really tempted to give this one 5 stars—as it is, I’m settling for 4, partly because I read a really ratty old mass market paperback edition with tiny print, partly because I give way too many 5 stars ratings, and partly because I’d rather you read it and gave it the 5th star yourself.

I don’t usually generalize from myself to other people, at least not in any ways that do credit to me or them, but I liked the narrator from almost the very beginning, and pretty quickly, he won me over thinki

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I’m really tempted to give this one 5 stars—as it is, I’m settling for 4, partly because I read a really ratty old mass market paperback edition with tiny print, partly because I give way too many 5 stars ratings, and partly because I’d rather you read it and gave it the 5th star yourself.

I don’t usually generalize from myself to other people, at least not in any ways that do credit to me or them, but I liked the narrator from almost the very beginning, and pretty quickly, he won me over thinking there might be common ground here. I’ll admit, the idea of going through 254 pages with a Mormon protagonist got things off to a somewhat hesitant start, but when the kid started reading, and reading important literary titles at that, not only reading them, but hiding them from his Bishop father inside porno mags when he knew he was going to be caught…well, I liked him. This kid is off, just enough, to be someone I’d like to know.

When the same kid takes the rap for a friend’s bag of pot, does two years in San Quentin for the crime, and then resumes his relationship with the friend without ever mentioning or expecting anything to come from the incident, well, let’s just say it reminds me of a time and a time of life when some of us, young and inexperienced, would like to think we’d never have ‘ratted’ on our dealer. (It was the late ‘60s or early ‘70s, there were festivals, trails and traces, VW microbuses, and an in-group mindset . You mighta needed to be there.)

But our protagonist isn’t a child of the ‘60s. Or the ‘50s of Kerouac’s Sal Paradise or Dean Moriarty. He’s run away to San Francisco prior to WWII, coming of age in brothels and bilges. This guy could, today, be the geezer at the family reunion, with sparkling eyes, a knowing grin, and a don’t-fuck-with-me-ever expression. At least, I’d like to think so, and at least, that’s the impression you might have after reading the first half of the book.

On reading the second half, readers are faced with a new protagonist—not completely new, but new nevertheless. A disaster at sea lands Larry Backus/Ben Davenant in a naval hospital where doctors attempt to put back together his damaged body and his damage psyche, and this is where things really start to cook. LB yields his identity and begins life as BD. Incremental yielding, incremental new life. A new wife. A new family. New friends. But always lurking are those elements of the ‘who I was’ in conflict with the ‘who I am.’ Harris brings the reader to a knowledge of the protagonist as his real identity begins to make sense to him, and as we question our own roles in the identity we’ve created for ourselves. Bits and pieces resurfacing, the old imposing on the new, the roles of friends, family and love and their creation of the person. Nicely done.

It’s somewhat surprising that women readers have tended to like this one. The repeated references to women as ‘receptacles’ or ‘machines’ doesn’t impress the brightest women readers (the one’s we’re lucky enough to know or are getting to know). However, to Harris’ credit, readers aren’t stuck with an antediluvian perspective the protagonist outgrows. Mortal Leap is not, so much, beautiful writing (although it may be glimpsed here) as it is a meaningful story, beautifully told, part coming-of-age adventure, part coming-to-peace saga. Before stepping into a Grant Wood painting, this guy description wrote one helluva story. A final thought on the novel’s masculinity, I think there is definitely a sense of a masculine reader here, more than simply a masculine point of view; I suspect it wasn’t so much written in a way men might like it more, rather it’s written in a way men might read it because we need it more.

If you can get your hands on it, read it.

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Sep 07, 2012 Patty rated it 5 of 5 stars

My favorite moments in the book came very early. I loved the portrayal of sneaking off to read as an illicit act, and I was sorry when the protagonist succumbed to the more ordinary, typical illicit acts to be found in the wider world outside of the family home. I was also sorry that the thread of reading was only very cursorily continued, as it was the thing that I related to the most. I also love the moments of survival on the island, before the "rescue." I think the second half of the book pa...more

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Feb 20, 2013 Tuck rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: australia-newzealand-down-under-stu, noir, oh-loyd-i-wanna-be-hearkbroken, sailing-and-fighting

thoughtful and exciting novel of a man who loses his identities in wwii. it's like of james cain somehow mind-melded with denis johnson and wrote about a merchant marine in the dirty thirties. please see other wonderful reviews for some smart and passionate ideas of this wonderful almost "lost" novel. like maureen's http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
rod's, who started this all by his championing http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

brian's http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

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Apr 11, 2013 Wanda marked it as to-read

Recommended to Wanda by: Bettie

10 APR 2013 -- recommended by my Dear Friend Bettie. Thank you so very much Miss Bettie.

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May 15, 2013 John Spillane marked it as to-read

Apr 26, 2013 Mark Broadhead marked it as to-read

Apr 21, 2013 Ali marked it as to-read

Apr 19, 2013 Jonathan marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Apr 14, 2013 Drez marked it as to-read

Apr 12, 2013 Chris marked it as to-read

Apr 11, 2013 Helen marked it as to-read

Shelves: waiting-on-my-tablet

Apr 10, 2013 Laura marked it as to-read

Apr 09, 2013 Glenn marked it as to-read

Shelves: wishlist-fiction

Apr 09, 2013 David marked it as to-read

Apr 06, 2013 Kate Brooke-Davidson marked it as to-read

Apr 03, 2013 Lori marked it as to-read

Apr 01, 2013 Sasha marked it as to-read-unlimited

title link	preview: Mortal Leap
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