Review of Eat Pray Love (2010) by Shiira — 17 Aug 2010

"Eat Pray Love" would be easier to mock if author Elizabeth Gilbert wasn't a National Book Award nominee(for "The Last American Man"), and had both her fiction and non-fiction works cited by The New York Times as being "notable".

So if you're going to be a hater, categorically labeling the memoirist as being narcissistic, the latest offender of the "me" lit boom, heed her credentials, because Gilbert's navel-gazing is not your garden variety navel-gazing, like that of a populist hack, or a self-proclaimed, self-help guru flake-turned scribe.

Arguably, "Eat Pray Love" should be mentioned in the same breath as Stephen Daldry's "The Hours", in addition to its obvious genre classification: the "chick flick", and sub-genre: a woman goes on a journey of self-discovery(e.

G. Audrey Welles' "Under the Tuscan Sun"). Make no mistake about it. Elizabeth Gilbert is a literary writer, albeit not of the same caliber as Virginia Woolf, she is literary within the context of her times; her books belonging to a lesser canon, but a canon of sorts, nevertheless.

As played by Julia Roberts, the Pen/Hemingway Award finalist(for her 1997 short story collection "Pilgrims") has an ironical spirit about her, when you compare the real-life Gilbert with Ruth Thomas, the sedentary island heroine from the writer's warring lobster fishermen saga "Stern Men".

The fictional Ruth, in spite of being exposed to boarding school, was content to eat shellfish, and someday marry a man who caught them. Thanks to "Eat Pray Love", the reader can't help but psychoanalyze Gilbert through her prior texts.

At the time of the 2001 novel's publication, it's only natural to speculate that the then-married writer was trying to justify the institution of marriage, the pros of settling down, since Ruth chooses the island over the world(well, if you consider Maine, the world); or maybe, more accurately, Gilbert was simply revisiting her seventeen-year-old self, back when the younger lass believed in home and family.

Both a journalist and a novelist, Gilbert, amidst the other Indians during the film adaptation's strongest chapter, "Pray", wears her reporter's hat while lending her ear to a local girl, bemoaning the fast-approaching date of her arranged marriage to a boy she's never met.

True to form, objectivist form, Gilbert doesn't share her contemporaneous prejudices against matrimonial unions with the beseeching young woman, a terrified bride-to-be who probably wanted an enlightened opinion, a western opinion, but instead gets a disappointingly stock one.

Concerning nuptials, Gilbert, a feminist, as demonstrated through her counter-traditional actions, in effect, lies to the girl, which presents an existential dichotomy of the highest order. On one hand, Gilbert doesn't want to come across like some ugly American, who disregards the sanctity of Hindu law, but still, as the girl's friend and mentor, speaking woman to woman, independent of the cultural divide that separates the east from the west, the older woman owes it to the young girl to consider rebellion.

Although Gilbert proves time and time again to be a wonderful human being("Eat" is a lot of fun; Italy, a land of enchantment), she does, in this instance, come across as a hypocrite, but this flaw only makes her more interesting, since all artists live in their own moral universes, with its contradictions and blissful ignorance.