Six Hands Clapping - Paperback

by Bill Broder (Author)

Six Hands Clapping is a unique American family story depicting the recent rise of Zen Buddhism in the United States. It is a tale of love, utopian religious ideals, and human frailty that has been repeated in different forms on this continent since the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. The novel, told from the point of view of the children of two American-born Zen Buddhist leaders, begins when the mother invites her grown children to witness her suicide at her Women's Meditation Center in the Yolla Bolly Wilderness of Mendocino County, California. The dramatic scenes of the family history unravel as the children journey from London, Brooklyn, and the Afghanistan Hindu Kush mountain battlefields. We learn that their mother, like a good Samurai Zen woman, is determined to defeat her enemy, cancer, before it destroys her. As she awaits the arrival of her children, she completes the story of her marriage to their charismatic father, his serial seduction of his Buddhist followers, and the marital break-up.. Although the children have fled Buddhism, their lives have been profoundly altered by their parents' practice. The three and their father unite in their mother's wilderness Zendo to witness her last words and her death. This final scene confirms the three most fundamental Buddhist principles of existence: impermanence, suffering, and not-self.

Author Biography

BILL BRODER has published nine books of fiction: The Sacred Hoop, Sierra Club Books; Remember This Time, written with his wife, Gloria Kurian Broder, Newmarket Press; Taking Care of Cleo, Handsel Books/Other Press; and the following books by The Ainslie Street Project: The Thanksgiving Trilogy, including Crimes of Innocence, Esau's Mountain, and What Rough Beast?; Two Russian Bicycles, consisting of two novellas, Tolstoy's Wife and The Sphinx of Kiev; Belief, A Novel; and The Teeth of God. He has published one book of nonfiction: A Prayer for the Departed, The Ainslie Street Project. Broder has also acted as member, executive director, and artistic director of a playwrights' workshop, California On Stage, and as completed a number of full-length plays, which have received staged readings throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Two of his plays were presented as staged readings at The Second and Third Annual California Studies Conference in Sacramento, California. His play Abalone! was produced in Carmel, California. Throughout his free-lance writing career, he has worked with publishers and exhibit designers to create materials for educational institutions