Tricycle | Awake in the World

The Time of New Weather
Sean Murphy
New York: Bantam Dell, 2005.
326 pp.; $13.00 (paper)

In his fourth book, the writer and longtime Zen practitioner Sean Murphy gives us a vision of America that is at once familiar and bizarre, a world where even time and gravity are no longer reliable, where diseases like “On-To-The-Next-Thing Syndrome” and “Too-Many-Things-At-Once Disorder” are ravaging the land. An intriguing but sometimes frustrating novel of spiritual search and political revolt, The Time of New Weather tells the stories of Buddy LeBlanc, a strangely precocious boy with a gift for minor miracles, and Bibi Brown, a “reluctant sage” and erstwhile spiritual teacher who lives under a bridge and can meditate himself into near transparency.