Baby Got Books

The Saint

Last week I linked to a long form article by Jon Krakauer that is available as a pay-per-PDF. That article completely worked in electronic format. It was a long article, but short enough to be reasonable as computer/phone reading material. However, before I read that Krakauer article, I dove into a similar length article on the Kindle for Android/PC apps (I read it on both) that was brilliant. It reminded me, somewhat ironically, of the long form articles that I used to read in Outside Magazine – like the Krakauer articles that eventually became Into Thin Air. I’ve been meaning to gush about Oliver Broudy’s The Saint ever since. So let’s get to it.

The Saint is “the true story of how one man’s search for virtue lead to the brink of madness.” Broudy is a successful writer and seemed to have the dream job as an editor of the prestigious Paris Review. Success is always in the eye of the beholder, however, and Broudy finds himself increasingly at odds with the status consciousness endemic to New York City:

…there comes a point when the gnawing insecurity in which big cities specialize ceases to be a useful goad and thenceforth merely serves as soil for a host of other noxious phenomena–insiderism, narcicism, phoniness, sniping–all of which degrade and obstruct the relationships that give life meaning. This is particularly the case among my crowd–the literary types…

In this mindset, Broudy stumbles across a charismatic modern shaman named James Otis in a meeting with film maker Spike Jonze. Otis is in the midst of a hunger strike to both show his remorse for a recent conflict with the Indian government and to center himself as he plans his next move. Otis seems completely different from the cutthroat city around him – selfless and above the rat race. Broudy quickly falls into Otis’s orbit and begins to see him as a visionary and saint-like person. Otis’s spat with the Indian government arose from his sale of Gandhi relics at a Manhattan auction house. He is determined to sort things out with India, and, hey, while he’s there, why not head into Tibet and work some magic up there, too:

And so when James announced that he was flying to India to finalize the Mallya deal and engage in potentially hazardous work, there was really no question of remaining in New York. This was the chance that I’d been waiting for, Clearly I had to go with him.

Broudy quickly loses any journalistic distance from Otis and becomes a chaperone/handler for the increasingly scatter-brained mystic. Otis, it turns out, is an heir to the elevator fortune and the ex-husband of the heir to the Muppets fortune. He mentions this frequently to impress upon the Tibetans that he is a player. It takes Broudy longer than one might think to come to the realization that Otis has, as my grandfather liked to say, more dollars than sense. Armed with an over-sized ego and staggering naivety, Otis is well on his way to becoming a one-man international incident.

The Saint is an engaging look at Broudy’s search for meaning and truth and the disappointment that naturally follows from the realization that he has chosen the wrong path. It’s an excellent read and definitely worth checking out. The Saint is available as a “Kindle Single” from Amazon. Like Krakauer, Oliver Broudy is a writer with a pedigree whose long form articles may be tailor made for consumption without the patronage of a magazine or newspaper. It will be interesting to see if this is the wave of the future for long form journalism.

Books, Fiction, Review | Tim | April 26, 2011 9:32 am

2 Comments

By James Otis, May 1, 2011 @ 2:54 pm

Oliver Broudy has made many errors as a magazine journalist with misquotations, incorrect facts, and outright lies in his latest and most libelous work, The Saint. This work clearly brings his integrity into question. Writers like Mr. Broudy should learn from the lessons of Jayson Blair who resigned from the NYtimes over plagiarism and fabrication being discovered within his stories.