My Belly Button Is Really Deep

It's not often that I read a book written in the last half-century, and it's quite uncommon that I spend my precious commuting time on a new release. But, occasionally, I feel that I ought to have some contact with the present, so I read a book published in the calendar year in which I happen to be living. (Parenthetically, C.S. Lewis' advice about giving a volume at least 30 years from publication before deciding its worth seems wiser and wiser as I read more.)

I bought Strange Piece of Paradise by Terri Jentz for my wife after it got a good review in the New York Times. Supposedly it was a true crime story, written by the victim, which included reflections on her own experience and the phenomenon of violence in America. I hadn't intended to read it, but life in Bay Ridge started to get hectic, so I set aside Nick Wolterstorff's Divine Discourse for Strange Piece of Paradise, just to give my brain a break.

Terri Jentz was bicycling across the country with a friend from Yale in the summer of 1977 when, at a roadside park in Oregon where the girls had camped for the night, the two were run over in their tent by a pickup truck and subsequently axed-nearly to death. Their attacker was never apprehended, and the statute of limitations on attempted murder in Oregon at that time was 3 years. However, 15 years after the event, Jentz felt that she needed to solve the crime herself in order to experience closure, so the bulk of the book deals with her amateur detective work on her own attempted murder, and her psychological ordeal in trying to get past the event.

Paradise is at least twice as long as it needs to be. Not only that, but its author seems to think that the fact that she graduated from Yale means that anything that strikes her as profound actually is so. This is obsessive introspection paraded as insight on a 542-page scale. In addition to this, coincidence is invested with significance in ways that seem like caricature-except that there is no humor in this book. The book is driven by obsession and neediness in such a way that one is not likely to sympathize with the author; one rather sympathizes with the other girl, who was more seriously injured but learned to live past the crime. "Shayna Weiss," as she is named in Paradise, refuses insistently to play the game that Jentz is so keen on. "Weiss" fades out of Jentz's life, with an occasional admonition to Jentz to seek professional help.

The limpness of this book is increased by the fact that, although Jentz devotes 8 years to the investigation, she never confronts the suspect, and never amasses enough evidence to be damning (though she thinks she does). To me, Jentz's effort is intriguing only as a display of a phenomenon which Kierkegaard noted in The Book on Adler: absolutely anything can seem profound if one ruminates on it enough. Kierkegaard considered that Magister Adler's writings were quite banal; the only thing that kept Adler from noticing this is that he had repeated his thoughts to himself with such studiousness that they appeared impenetrably deep. Jentz, I think, is guilty of the same crime. Sustained navel-gazing can present one with the illusion that one's belly button is incredibly profound; poking a tape measure in there usually produces a different conclusion.