“I could not have written this book without the storytelling gift and unsettling insights of Ralph Silverman,” reads the preface to Fred Waitzkin’s new novel, “Anything Is Good” (Open Road Media).
Ralph Silverman was the author and narrator’s best friend in high school 65 years ago, though the distances between their interests and intellects were vast. While the narrator dreamed of a Beat life after college, riding the rails, womanizing, searching for the soul of the country à la Jack Kerouac, Ralph ventured into a world of philosophers, Kierkegaard and Husserl. They had almost nothing in common, but the bond they’d forged as children endured. Ralph was socially inept. He had few friends, though an active interior life. He’d converse with his pet parrot, talk to himself. His family’s focus was the booming real estate business run by Ralph’s father, Isaac, whose consuming ambition was matched by his ruthlessness. Ralph’s relationship with Isaac was remote at best.
At the University of Wisconsin, Ralph was a so-so student, dabbling in a variety of courses until he discovered philosophy, into which he dove headlong. Back in New York after college, Ralph retreated into a world of obsessive research and invention. An early devotee of computers — this in the late 1960s — he told anyone who would listen that they would change the world. When his obsession with studying rendered him unreachable, his live-in girlfriend of several years left him.
As he became almost completely cut off from anything and everyone he’d known, only his sister, Ann, still tried to help him. For some people like Ralph — brilliant but socially disconnected — psychotherapy sometimes offers a way forward. But too often they take to drugs and/or let themselves go completely. In a last-ditch effort, Ann persuaded him to fly with her to Miami, where Ralph could stay with a cousin for a while. Failure followed, and Ralph walked out the door one day with just the clothes on his back, no shoes, and began 20-plus years of intentional homelessness.
The heart of the novel begins here, in mind-numbing, soul-crunching days that build into weeks, months, and years. Early on, Ralph chose to make his home behind a low row of bushes in a park in Miami Beach. No furniture, no protection from the weather, no sanitary facilities. He never begged. Gathering a few dollars from others’ generosity, he’d buy cottage cheese and raisins, maybe a piece of fresh fruit. He lost so much weight he couldn’t keep his pants up. Sometimes other park denizens would give him half a sandwich, they were so concerned about him. “Hunger settled into my being like breathing,” as he put it.
Though he tried to stay to himself, he couldn’t avoid interacting with his park-mates. They shunned, threatened, offered advice, and he learned to survive — given the constant threat of violence, survival was no small thing. Drug deals went down as a matter of course, usually out in the open, and men fighting over women was commonplace. Once he witnessed two women fighting, the victor walking away after battering her foe’s head on a park bench until she’d killed her.
Ralph only occasionally kept in touch with his previous life, via collect calls to his father and to his friend Fred. Despite entreaties to come back to New York, to extricate himself from a life they considered as pointless as it was dangerous, he stayed true to his mission, as unclear as it was to anyone, even himself.
So, why? How did Ralph make sense of his life on the streets, in the park, eventually under a fishing pier in Pompano Beach? There are moments of clarity, of him reveling in the simplicity of his existence — “I discovered that if you believe you are invisible, you really become invisible.” More often there are moments of confusion, despair: “One morning I woke … feeling entirely lost. I didn’t know where I was or why I felt this way … I stopped thinking for hours … I had never felt such sorrow.”
Then Ralph meets Jenny, a Chinese woman who carries an imaginary daughter in her arms. Meaning leaks back into his life as he teaches her English during an affair that lasts many months. The book gets its both nonsensical and profound title from a pet phrase of Jenny’s — “Anything is good.”
Still, life is precarious. For every heartening, hopeful development, there is a devastating counterweight. A rash of suicides sweeps through Ralph’s homeless community. People appear out of nowhere, and vanish, responding to a migratory urge known only to them.
For us who struggle to comprehend life on the streets, it’s tempting to conclude that those who are homeless suffer unimaginable loss, trauma, or abuse. In Ralph’s case, it’s not so clear. His sense of otherness plagued him all his life. Is it enough for him to ostracize himself from his former life, his boundless creative curiosity, to immobilize himself in another universe where he’s accountable only to himself? If he died, who would know?
Lightly disguised as Ralph’s old pal, Fred, Waitzkin presents us with plenty to consider. While we struggle to understand Ralph’s choice, we may also wonder what in our world could drive us down such a radical path. Is “Anything Is Good” Fred Waitzkin’s reaction to that question? Or, as he ripens into old age (and spends much of his time in West Tisbury), maybe he couldn’t resist reconsidering the life of his best childhood friend. In either case, readers are lucky to witness an exploration of an unorthodox approach to life, rocky and circuitous as it may be at times, but equally compelling and thought-provoking.
And, by the way, how great is that title? Thanks, Jenny.