Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road Book

When I first read this book, it was entitled "Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance", and I picked it up because of the obvious allusion to Robert Pirsig's classic "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (not that I had ever read it, mind you). I read it, really enjoyed it, and then had a friend tell me about Blue Like Jazz well over a year later; I actually did not make the connection that it was Miller's story until well into BLJ when he made an oblique mention to his trip. At any rate, it was well over a decade ago that I read it, and both Miller and I have changed not insignificantly in the intervening time, so I thought it would be interesting to read the re-release of the book (not that much was changed, it seemed), particularly after just watching the Blue Like Jazz movie. I was glad to have enjoyed it at least as much - if not more - than I did a decade ago, and that the story and text itself in many ways felt just as fresh as it did on first reading. The actual happenings of the story (the "plot", as it were) are relatively brief, but Miller's descriptions leave vivid pictures of each setting and encounter he and his friend Paul have on their way from Texas to Oregon in a Volkswagen van. Miller's prose is very poetic, and this book in particular is very "meandery" as he allows himself to pursue a number of different trails of thought in theological wonderings, existential ramblings, and epistemological ponderings, many of which are meant to provoke thought on the part of the reader. Miller's asides and forays into thoughts precede his slightly more focused diatribes in his later works, and although they do at times seem frustratingly immature, they do capture not only a specific time in his life but an ethos that does permeate much of the generations of North American Evangelicals in the past two decades. There is a lightness to what he writes without being flippant or disrespectful, and what redeems some of the more meandering passages is often a brief insertion of self-awareness of just how ridiculous he realizes he sounds a lot of the time. Miller is an author after my own heart, and I can see that I write much the same way: with total conviction of what I am writing combined with a paradoxical meta-awareness of how silly I might sound to someone who does not see things the same way I do. In all, Deserts is a fun story of two guys on a road trip and their thoughts on God, and it is a necessary predecessor for all of Miller's subsequent works.