Seeking salvation from a suspicious shaman
Sam Lansky’s debut novel “Broken People” a journey of self-discovery.
Sam, the hero of Sam Lansky’s debut novel, “Broken People” (Hanover Square Press, 304 pp., ★★g☆), has spent years looking for a quick fix.
In his teens, he was a Manhattan prep schooler who succumbed to a drug addiction he later parlayed into a memoir. Now 28 and living in LA, he’s sober but single and adrift. So when he hears about a “mysterious master shaman who could fix everything that was wrong with you in three days,” he’s in.
The so-called shaman, Jacob, doesn’t seem promising.
He intones about “transdimensional intercession” and promotes an ayahuasca treatment that smacks of spendy ’70s hippiedom. But Sam is sick with self-loathing – especially about his body – and is desperate to unload some psychic baggage. As his friend (and narrative comic relief) puts it,
“life is a late-capitalist hellscape, so your mystical journey might as well be one, too.”
The journey is also a break from his stalled second memoir, which his agent finds lacking: “Because you are young, you think everything that happens to you is interesting,” Sam is told.
Whether or not Jacob’s brews and bromides are effective, Sam spends those three days tunneling into memories of the men he fell for after his recovery. Chief among them is Charles, a handsome and well-off risk analyst who’s charmed by Sam’s intelligence and sputteringly enthusiastic riffs on Taylor Swift’s songwriting. Charles offers a portal into wealth and security: They talk about buying a home in the Hamptons, where Sam can chat casually with Gwyneth Paltrow and “have pastel trousers in every color and the slightly leathered look that older leisure gays have.”
Of course, the shiny surfaces, both real and imagined, cover plenty of rot: Sam is worn down by a stressful media job, a deadline for his first memoir, and the drug habits of Charles’ friends.
The connections between Sam the character and Sam Lansky the author go beyond a shared first name. Lansky has also written an addiction memoir, 2016’s “The Gilded Razor,” and works as a magazine editor in LA. Lansky says “Broken People” was inspired by his 20s in New York, but even if the novel’s failed romances are invented, they echo the problem Sam’s agent mentions. The quirky healer, the funny friend, and the three-day mystical journey all feel like high-concept scaffolding erected around familiar breakup tales. A friend makes that very point to Sam: “You think your pain is so monumental, but it’s actually pretty mundane.” The novel’s title implies a lot of busted souls, but there’s really just one, moderately bent.
“Broken People” has two virtues, though. There’s the strength of Lansky’s writing, which has easy humor combined with some of the rough edges of early Bret Easton Ellis. And he writes with depth and candor about male body image, a subject that tends to get short shrift in fiction. A late section of the novel smartly explores how insecurity and anxiety turn into paranoia and sickness. Sam’s body, Lansky writes, was “a battlefield of trigger points and insecurities.”
Lansky has plenty of keen observations but deserves a stronger novel to support them.