Lunch with Buddha

On the surface, LUNCH WITH BUDDHA is a story about family. Otto Ringling and his sister Cecelia could not be more different. He’s just turned 50, an editor of food books at a prestigious New York publishing house, a man with a nice home in the suburbs, children he adores, and a sense of himself as being a mainstream, upper-middle-class American. Cecelia is the last thing from mainstream. For two decades she’s made a living reading palms and performing past-life regressions. She believes firmly in our ability to communicate with those who have passed on. It will turn out, though, that they have more in common than just their North Dakota roots.In LUNCH WITH BUDDHA, when Otto faces what might be the greatest of life’s difficulties, it is Cecelia who knows how to help him. As she did years earlier in this book’s predecessor, BREAKFAST WITH BUDDHA, she arranges for her brother to travel with Volya Rinpoche, a famous spiritual teacher — who now also happens to be her husband. After early chapters in which the family gathers for an important event, the novel portrays a road trip made by Otto and Rinpoche, in a rattling pickup, from Seattle to the family farm in North Dakota. Along the way the brothers-in-law have a series of experiences — some hilarious, some poignant — all aimed at bringing Otto a deeper peace of mind. They visit American landmarks; they have a variety of meals, both excellent and awful; they meet a cast of minor characters, each of whom enables Rinpoche to impart some new spiritual lesson. Their conversations range from questions about life and death to talk of history, marijuana, child-rearing, sexuality, Native Americans, and outdoor swimming. In the end, with the help of their miraculous daughter, Shelsa, and the prodding of Otto’s own almost-adult children, Rinpoche and Cecelia push this decent, middle-of-the-road American into a more profound understanding of the purpose of his life. His sense of the line between possible and impossible is altered, and the story’s ending points him toward a very different way of being in this world.

"I'm fascinated...with the way people deal with difficulty, hardship, pain, disappointment, tragedy and life's seeming inequities. And...how people deal with the spiritual search, in the face of life's hardships... Some people indulge their pain and pass it on. Some fight it to a draw. And some transcend. My goal - reflected in many of my characters - is to transcend. I'm not there yet."

A DISCUSSION OF LUNCH WITH BUDDHA
(Abridged version of a conversation between authors Roland Merullo & Matthew Quick that is included with the novel.)

Matthew Quick: We've known each other for 5 or so years, during which we've discussed writing, publishing, spirituality, and life in general. Your fiction often explores the questions and concerns that are most important to you. What led you to write Lunch with Buddha?

Roland Merullo: From my earliest years, when I was a devout Catholic boy living in a world where the rules and traditions of Catholicism were the air we all breathed, I've been puzzling over what I'll call, for lack of a better term, "the meaning of life". Why do people suffer? Why is the suffering spread around so unevenly? What are we doing here in the first place? What happens to a person's spirit after he or she dies? In my 20's, my eyes were opened to answers that came from places other than the Christian tradition. Rather than seeming like a challenge to that tradition, the wisdom of the East has always seemed to me like an expansion of it. Buddhism, especially, but also Sufism, Hinduism, and Taoism made the story of Jesus more understandable and believable to me, not less. I tend to write about what I'm most focused on, in my interior life. I've had a daily meditation practice for 30-some years and still do a lot of reading across the spiritual spectrum. I love to drive and see new places, love to eat different kinds of food, love to see the humor in life and make people laugh. So it was natural that all these things would find their way into a novel. And it was surprisingly easy for me, after a 7-year hiatus, to get right back into the mindsets of these characters.

MQ: I've loved every Roland Merullo book I've read, and Lunch with Buddha may be my favorite yet. Why do you think that is?

RM: I don't know. I'm too close to the book right now to have any kind of perspective on it at all. But I know from your fine writing, and from our talks, that you have the same great curiosity about life that I have. You wonder why people behave the way they do. You try to bring some light into the world when you can. And you make up stories that contain both the puzzlement and curiosity, and your idea of an answer to the big questions. We are mining that same vein, or maybe similar veins in the same mine. I really believe that every soul is put on earth with a certain set of skills and interests, and a certain purpose or purposes. I think we've both found what we're supposed to be doing here, and our job is simply to do it as well as we can, deal with whatever obstacles we face, and let the chips fall.

MQ: Early in the novel you write: "Rinpoche seemed to live on the far side of some line that marked the boundary of ordinary American reality." Is that where you want to live?

RM: I'm a very down-to-earth kind of person. I like realistic fiction and films. I like people who can cook, or hammer a nail, or fix a bleeding wound, or comfort a crying child. But I'm also not completely convinced that our assumptions are always 100% accurate. A few centuries ago people tormented Galileo for daring to say that the earth moved around the sun. For how many centuries before that was the assumption incorrect? Einstein's theories similarly challenged the prevailing "wisdom" of the day. So I think it's wise to be a little skeptical about our laws and truths. Maybe, for instance, at least some of the psychics who claim to be in contact with the dead are actually in contact with the dead. I don't know. I have very sensible friends whose late spouses "spoke" to them. Surely there are a lot of phonies and scammers out there, a lot of people who "see" the end of the world, or speak in tongues, or have visions, but are simply fooling themselves or someone who is paying them. Still, I leave the door open just a bit to the idea that there's more to life than the things we can measure and explain. In Breakfast, Otto starts out totally skeptical of Rinpoche's interest in meditation and the interior life. By the end of the novel he's been moved off that position a short ways. In Lunch, though he doesn't really want it to be so, he suspects that death is final, and he'll never have any communication with his beloved wife again. By the end of the novel that assumption, too, has been shaken just a bit. It's a tightrope walk. I'm a realist. I don't want to write flaky books. But I am all about pushing the boundaries of the interior life - which is the heart and soul of Rinpoche's talk in Spokane.

MQ: "Why didn't good prevail?" your character asks. It's a question you and I have talked about many times. In most of your books, good usually does prevail, if only in some small way. Would you say that your fiction is a vehicle of hope? Is that why you write?"

RM: Yes, a vehicle of hope. I think we both work that way, no? And, yes, that does reflect my view of life. I'm fascinated - and I think this shows itself in every single one of my books, even the golf books - with the way people deal with difficulty, hardship, pain, disappointment, tragedy and life's seeming inequities. And in the last few books it's been: how do people deal with the spiritual search, in the face of life's hardships? Some people indulge their pain and pass it on. Some fight it to a draw. And some people transcend. My goal - reflected in many of my characters - is to transcend. I'm not there yet.

MQ: Otto says, "Whole libraries of subjects were off limits now, at least in my circles." Many of the ideas in Lunch with Buddha are "off limits" to so many people here in America, and yet, your work seems to provide a much needed bridge. Why does America need Buddha and Eastern thought?

RM: As to the first part: Otto's speaking to the way conversations about certain subjects have become stultified in this society. The national discussion has turned into two camps ridiculing each other. Bigotry on the one hand, political correctness on the other. Thank God we still have comedians.
To make a bad generalization, I think Eastern thought is primarily inner-focused. The pejorative term is "navel gazing." Well, I think we could use a bit more navel gazing in our society. We do so many wonderful things in the external world - photos from Mars, medicines for AIDS and other illnesses, remarkable surgeries, incredible technological gizmos. But when Steve Jobs (I may be wrong, but I believe he had a Buddhist practice) was dying he is reputed to have said, "Oh, wow!" As if he saw something. I somehow doubt that what he saw was the next generation of the iPad. I think it was some interior experience, some wider understanding of the miracle of life. Except in its mystical tradition - which is vast and of long standing but largely ignored in this society - Christianity is outer-focused. It's too often all about behavior and sin and loud prayer. Okay. But what Rinpoche does for Otto is to take that foundation of good behavior and show him that it is a starting point, not an end point. "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." Jesus said that, not Buddha. But it's the Easterners who pursue it more avidly, and I think we would benefit from that pursuit.
 
MQ: Please tell me there will be a Dinner with Buddha and that I will be able to read it relatively soon.
 
RM: First, thank you for these superb questions, and for your friendship and your books. As for Dinner, well, I have laid the groundwork for that at the end of Lunch. Just need to come up with another route, a part of the country we haven't covered. I'm open to suggestion.