By Roberta Silman

Fred Waitzkin’s beautiful, sad book will stay with me forever.

Anything Is Good by Fred Waitzkin. Open Road Media, 191 pages, $32.99.

A seasoned writer with five previous books to his credit, Fred Waitzkin is probably best known for his memoir about his relationship with his son, a chess genius, called Searching for Bobby Fischer. That book was made into a movie both deliciously charming and moving for its generosity of spirit. So I was more than happy to look at this new “novel” which is a mixture of fiction and memoir. Indeed, Anything Is Good is unlike anything I have ever read and, although incredibly dark, it is also very hard to put down until you have gotten to the end.

The narration veers from Fred’s point of view to that of Ralph Silverman, Fred’s best friend in high school, the smartest kid in the class, a polymath who was also fun, a kid who, not surprisingly, was the victim of every bully who crossed his path. As Waitzkin explains at the beginning of this book, he and Ralph “weren’t on the same page, sometimes close, but never the same page, and I never knew exactly what page Ralph was on. Somehow, we operated in a middle ground. Ralph spoke about his ideas as if he were translating from a different language so I could understand.” Perhaps that’s because Ralph has led a life that no one can really understand. With great bravery and skill Watzkin has set himself the task of unraveling it.

Fred begins by telling Ralph’s story, which began in a dreary house in Riverdale, north of Manhattan, with his parents, Sadie and Isaac, and his sister, Ann. Isaac is from Israel, has a textile business in midtown, and he and his wife and daughter care about nothing but money; the business is their “fortress.” Ralph has nothing in common with them and goes off to college at the University of Wisconsin where he studies philosophy and meets Jean. By the time he and Jean move to New York City, his father’s interest has gone from textiles to real estate, and he is rich. Ralph has no use for a Ph.D but is still immersed in philosophy, meeting often with his friend Bob Weingard who teaches philosophy at Rutgers. Meanwhile Jean is getting her doctorate in classics from the University of Pennsylvania and shuttling from Philadelphia to their apartment in Manhattan where she and Ralph are living an easy, lavish life.

During this time Ralph begins to exchange ideas with the well-known genius Saul Kripke, who teaches at Princeton, and begins exploring the world of those new machines called computers. He also discovers that his father has connections to the mob and a second family ensconced in an extravagant house in Westchester. After his mother dies — probably murdered at his father’s behest — and Jean disappears, Ralph’s life revolves around his hopes for the future of computers, particularly his exchanges with Kripke and Weingard. Waitzkin never makes it clear why Ralph never attains any academic status; we just know that he seems to live on the fringes of other people’s lives. In this marginal space he makes contributions to the research of others in string theory and the theory of the principle (in logic) called sorites. He also invents “get high music.” He calls it the Pythagoron and sells it to a record company.

After Isaac Silverman goes bankrupt and the family is broke, Ralph is rescued by his sister Ann, who takes him to Miami, depositing him like a large package in the house of a young cousin named Branden. The feckless Branden is willing to take Ralph in because he wants entree into Isaac’s business. (He does not have a clue that Isaac’s business has disappeared.) Here is Ralph describing his arrival:

Ann helped me place the computer on the end table and I was relieved that it fit. I needed a chair and perhaps a second chair to pile my notebooks, then I could go to work. With my ideas beginning to percolate, my sister’s impatience only barely registered. Then there was a moment of awkwardness — we were pulled hard in different directions and neither Ann nor I could find any words. Then my sister gave me hug and kiss and said she’d see me soon. I didn’t think to ask her when or where she was going. I think Ann was a little teary, but I don’t know, maybe that’s just my memory playing tricks.

That was the last time I ever saw my sister Ann.

I have quoted that passage because in it you can hear Ralph’s resigned voice, a voice that expects nothing of this world. For an unspecified time he lives quietly in one room, “analyzing language,” talking on the phone to Weingard and occasionally to Fred. But one day Branden becomes violent, and Ralph decides to escape Branden’s home, which stinks of the sickening smell of Chinese takeout and marijuana. And then, with no warning and in the twinkling of an eye, the brilliant Ralph Silverman descends into the life of a homeless man in Miami not far from where the old Seagull Hotel — his mother’s favorite — once thrived.

About halfway through the book there is a telling interlude, narrated by Fred, when he reveals details about his parents’ dismal marriage, his trips to Miami with his Dad, and how, many years later, on his way to meet friends for a fishing trip in the Florida Keys, he meets up with Ralph. And, finally, Fred makes the unflinching admission that, after Ralph has shown him the little spot where he lives as a homeless person and they have had a meal in a decent restaurant, he does not rescue his old friend. He simply watches Ralph return to his life on the street.

Author Fred Waitzkin. Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Except for one other short chapter from Fred’s point of view, the rest of the novel belongs to Ralph. He tells us almost every detail of his life as a homeless person — the forays to the dumpsters for food, the friends he makes, the way time just floats away when you are living from meal to meal or day to day, how the satisfaction of those immediate needs generates a weird fog of contentment, how exchanges with the police make it necessary to change locations (the story moves from Miami to Pompano), as well as the overwhelming sense of community that defines street people wherever they are. The most puzzling and moving aspect of this often bizarre tale is Ralph’s story of meeting Jenny, a deluded Asian girl who thinks she has a baby, who dances with incredible abandon, who speaks no English. A girl with whom Ralph falls in love. A girl who tells him from the bottom of her heart that “Anything is good.” Here is Ralph describing his time with Jenny, an interlude that will change him permanently:

Nights and mornings beneath the pier filled my life with laughter and wealth my father could never have dreamed of. With Jenny, who could not speak a proper sentence, I felt for the first time that I was understood. More than with my superstitious mom, who felt things deeply, but not me, not really, and my sister whom I adored but who thought I was nuts. More even than with Jean, whom I loved but needed to pretend I was a panther for her to really care about me. Jenny surely understood me better than Saul Kripke, whom the New York Times called the most intelligent man alive, and I wondered if within the fathomless depth of his logic Kripke could fathom such a love. For moments in a difficult life, I wasn’t straining to bridge the gap between me and someone, anyone else. This woman who did not speak English was able to feel Ralph, and I began to feel him myself. I felt like I was discovering Ralph. Was it true? How can one ever really know such things are true and lasting but that was how I felt.

Of course it cannot last. During their time together Jenny has been dancing in clubs, and finally finds a rich man who will take care of her and her phantom child. Around that time Ralph, now alone, witnesses an epidemic of suicide that spreads among the members of his current homeless community. So, after almost twenty years, he calls the one friend he has left in the “real” world, Fred, who helps him navigate through the social service system and who tells us at the end that:

for the last seventeen years Fred has lived in a tiny apartment in Fort Lauderdale . . . Using some of his social security money, Ralph built his own personal computer from scratch and began to research some of the newest writing on modal logic. He soon forged a relationship with a professor who taught epistemology at a local college, and they had long discussions about the early esoteric writing of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell and their profound influence on the development of digital computers in the 1960s and ultimately artificial intelligence. This is a subject Ralph intended to write about, and still does.

Yet Ralph still yearns for the street, where he felt a freedom he never dreamed of, where he felt in touch with nature and himself in a way he could never have imagined. And because his old friend, Fred Waitzkin, got permission from Ralph to tell his tale, we are now privy to this man’s odd life. As well as a glimpse of the lives of many of the people Ralph got to know on the street. So, by the time I reached the end of Anything is Good, I realized that Ralph’s story may not be as unusual as I first thought. If we read fiction to expand our vision, to bring us into places where we would never venture, and to teach us compassion, then Anything Is Good more than accomplishes those goals.

This beautiful, sad book will stay with me forever.

Roberta Silman is the author of five novels, a short story collection, and two children’s books. Her latest, Summer Lightning, has been released as a paperback, an ebook, and an audio book. Secrets and Shadows (Arts Fuse review) is in its second printing and is available on Amazon. It was chosen as one of the best Indie Books of 2018 by Kirkus and it is now available as an audio book from Alison Larkin Presents. A recipient of Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she has reviewed for the New York Times and Boston Globe, and writes regularly for the Arts Fuse. More about her can be found at robertasilman.com, and she can also be reached at rsilman@verizon.net.