Mark Leib’s ‘Image Breaker’ ponders universal questions
The 36-year-old protagonist of Mark E. Leib’s novel Image Breaker is knee-deep in a life crisis before he even realizes it.
Tristan Wishnasky is the Boston-based author of a trio of successful novels with a decidedly bleak world view: They illuminate and celebrate the “void” that is human existence, the empty and meaningless lives we lead, the classic definition of nihilism.
He’s just sold the movie rights to his latest bestseller, bought a swanky home and is enjoying the many fruits of his dark labors.
And then things happen. Wishnasky begins to question himself, his motives and his place in the world.
“All my life, I have been looking for a book which addressed my concerns about how to live meaningfully,” the Temple Terrace-based Leib explains. “Over the years, I’ve found some that helped a little bit. I found Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and thought that was good. When I was younger, I found The Catcher in the Rye. That was fine when you’re 17.
“One day I decided, why not write that book? Alice Walker had said ‘Write the book that you want to read.’ And I thought OK, no one else has done it, why don’t I? And it took two years, and a lot of revisions, and a lot of self-questioning.”
Published by Vine Leaves Press, Image Breaker defies the odds of 21st century fiction, in that religion – Wishnasky is a lapsed Jew – plays a major role in the narrative, and yet the book is no mere morality play. There’s no proselytizing; it’s a page-turner.
“Tristan,” says Leib, “is as nihilistic and cynical as can be. And almost against his will is forced to try to live meaningfully. I wanted that out there on the bookshelves, for people like me who go to literature for their philosophy.”
With the help of a young female rabbi, Wishnasky learns about compassion, good works and the power of prayer. Along the way, he discovers who among his friends and business acquaintances get it, and root for him, and those who believe he’s gone completely off his nut.
“Something that really turns me off about modern people writing about religion is when they use some 90-year-old grandfather as the source of wisdom,” explains Leib. “That’s the fastest way to lose my attention – ‘you have to be a nonagenarian in order to take these things seriously?’”
Early in the book, Wishnasky loses his longtime girlfriend, an avowed atheist, because she doesn’t like the changes in him. As Image Breaker unspools, he dates a succession of women, with varying “results.”
The book is by turns inspiring, shocking and very, very funny.
It’s Leib’s first novel, although he is a longtime journalist, and playwright with 20 published works. The most recent, When the Righteous Triumph, dramatized Tampa’s lunch counter protests during the civil rights era. It was produced by Stageworks Theatre last spring.
That sort of writing discipline, he reveals, helped a lot with his book. “In the theater, you cannot afford to lose your audience for five minutes,” Leib explains. “You lose them for five minutes, you’ve lost them for the rest of the show.
“I don’t dare lose the reader. So I had to make sure that the suspense was constant, that there were always lots of unanswered questions to deal with, and that there was always the promise of something about to happen.”
Leib himself has studied religion for 41 years. “So when I sat down to write the book, a lot of this stuff was already at my fingertips. I didn’t have to do an enormous amount of research.
“But I also wanted Tristan to have to deal with reality in the year 2023. And that is a lot of atheism, a lot of people who are angry at religion, a lot of people who feel abused by religion, and people who are having a wonderful time and doing good deeds without for a moment considering the possibility of God.
“I didn’t want a fairy tale. I didn’t want a fantasy. I wanted him to have as hard a time as possible making a change, so that anybody could see his or her own objections coming up all along the way.”
Mark E. Leib will discuss Image Breaker at 2 p.m. Sunday (July 23) at thestudio@620. Find details here.
Mark E. Leib will be in conversation with Dr. John Fleming at 7 p.m. Tuesday (July 25) at Tombolo Books. Find details here.
