Anything is Good by Fred Waitzkin
With Anything is Good, essayist, memoirist and novelist Fred Waitzkin melds all three of his literary pursuits into a seamless composition. The story has two narrators, a successful writer who speaks Waitzkin’s parts and his childhood friend, the brilliant but socially awkward Ralph Silverman (based on a real person known to the author). In Anything is Good, they grow apart as they grow older, linked only by occasional and increasingly uncomfortable phone calls after Ralph moves to Florida. The main story—the heart—of Anything is Good belongs Ralph, who becomes homeless as the result of his family’s increasing dysfunction.
Without grossly romanticizing the situation, Waitzkin depicts his friend’s descent into homelessness as a journey of experience. Ralph was always “a sojourner in a foreign land”; the author of computer programs and abstruse chains of logic suddenly learns about humanity—how to lift his head from abstractions and listen to the world around him. Waitzkin doesn’t ignore the negatives of living in the rough, including the bad drugs and worse violence. Some of the unhoused are criminals, others are unhooked from reality. Ralph experiences the “weird euphoria of the homeless and the dispossessed” and the “vague feelings of home when you no longer have a home.”
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