Book review: "Eat, Pray Love"

"Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia." By Elizabeth Gilbert. Penguin. $15.

I really loved this book.

That said, I also really hated this book.

Eat, Pray, Love is the memoir of a year that writer Elizabeth Gilbert spent traveling in Italy, India and Indonesia. She decided that a trip around the world was exactly what she needed after her divorce and subsequent failed rebound relationship; because she was a writer for GQ, she was able to get a book deal for the trip.

Gilbert is best known for her last book, The Last American Man, the nonfiction account of an authentic “Mountain Man.” I first discovered her when I read her novel, Stern Men, several years ago. The charming and quirky tale mixed romance and lobster fishing in a small town, but got little notice.

The memoir is a self-indulgent genre to begin with. But Eat, Pray, Love takes self-indulgence to a whole new level. We are supposed to care about Gilbert’s self-destructive relationships and quest to find good food, God and love.

And we do – or I did, at least. Gilbert is funny and clever and has a great way with words. When she travels to Naples with a friend to eat pizza, she writes:

“These pies we have just ordered – one for each of us – are making us lose our minds. I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair. Meanwhile, Sofie is practically in tears over hers, she’s having a metaphysical crisis about it, she’s begging me, “‘Why do they even bother trying to make pizza in Stockholm? Why do we even bother eating food at all in Stockholm?’”

I have felt like that about pizza (Sally’s in New Haven, in case you’re wondering), so I identified with Gilbert. Throughout the book I found myself saying, “Yes, that’s exactly like that!”

But 334 pages (in the paperback version, at least) of this prose gets old. Gilbert may be a good writer, but it takes editing to make a good writer great, to make her whiny complaints while at an ashram in India or struggling with visa issues in Bali matter.

The problem with Eat, Pray, Love is that it is too many things at once. It is a travelogue, a meditation on food and Italy, a search for enlightenment and a romance. Gilbert loves too many things, and she tries to cram it all in, and it just doesn’t congeal.

Still, if you can stop yourself from screaming when Gilbert is at her most annoying, her charms are plentiful. A year might be too long to travel with someone, but for a few days, here and there, Gilbert’s an amusing passenger to have along.