Right Here, Right Now » (Bargain)

Trey Ellis has been a professional novelist and screenwriter for eleven years and is the author of Platitudes and Home Repairs. He and his wife live in Santa Monica, California.

Through the Self-Help Glass — Very Darkly

Meet Ashton Robinson, a dashing playboy whose suave charm, worldly pretensions, and ecstatic seminars have made him one of the most successful motivational speakers in the country.

After an encounter with the synergistic effects of marijuana and expired cough syrup, Robinson renounces his life as a self-help icon and pronounces himself a spiritually enlightened master. Overnight he invents the world's newest religion, based on meditation, bungee-cord jumping, tantric sex, and The Gap. Has he stumbled upon one of the great truths of the universe? Or has the same outsized ego that fueled his success as a motivational speaker driven him over the edge?

With surgical wit and acuity, Trey Ellis has written a titillating and trenchant tale about the revivalist fervor of the American self-help industry. Right Here, Right Now is a corrosively funny and provocative exploration of the impulse to self-improvement — one of the most salient features of American popular culture at the close of the twentieth century.

Lang

The end of the world promises a lot -- sex, death, and enlightenment, not necessarily in that order -- especially for a brother willing and able to reinvent himself for a hungry public.

With the Christian cosmic odometer about to roll over to 2000, something big is primed to explode. Innumerable spiritual awakenings tease an expectant world. From the sacred to the profane, possible tomorrows unfurl at an alarming pace, sand and sense vacating the millennial hourglass faster and faster.

Sightings of Jesus or the Virgin Mary -- loving visages divined in the faded grain of a gnarled oak -- appear commonplace. New Age spiritualists call to the light/spirit/goddess/universe for answers. Even television's high priestess herself, the beloved Oprah, challenges us to Change Our Lives in five-minute sound bites. Meanwhile, atheists remain doggedly trenchant in their religious disbelief, as countless other sects concoct apocalyptic views of the impending Armageddon.

Well, amidst all of this heightened new-millennium hysteria emergesRight Here, Right Now , the third novel by Trey Ellis (Home Repairs and Platitudes ), melding religious extremism and humankind's basic desire for self-improvement into an alternately mystical and blasphemously sexy literary package.

Like he's writing a good Prince song, Ellis composes this story of Ashton Robinson's startling transformation from millionaire motivational speaker to a hypersexual spiritual guru. Think about it. What artist better juxtaposes the sacred with the carnal in a manner equally celebratory and almost unforgivably perverse?

Furthermore, in the same manner that Prince's persona epitomizes the brilliance of contradiction, Robinson glaringly symbolizes the inconsistent nature of New Age spirituality.

A typical brotha', Robinson left behind working-class parents for a somewhat humbling experience at Yale. That crucible is eventually the catalyst that springboards him into life as a wildly successful hawker of self-promoting, self-help seminars and expensive motivational tapes.

Still, even as celebrity status and wealth afford him every hedonistic pleasure imaginable -- women of every hue, global travel, and surfing, his rapturous pastime -- Robinson still feels incomplete.

Enter Mudamente, a Brazilian midget who routinely morphs into a striking brown-skinned woman. S/he serves as the angelic entity that introduces Robinson to axé, an Afro-Brazilian-rooted concept meaning "power" or "spirit." Overnight, with Robinson at the spiritual helm, axé becomes the world's newest religion. Worth mentioning, though, is that Robinson's fevered epiphany comes after overdosing on marijuana and expired cough syrup.

Anyway, the novel traces the birth of this new religion from its infancy to its premature death. Author Ellis creates a bond between Robinson and the reader by employing a microcassette recorder as conduit. Told in the first person, the story is essentially relayed as an ongoing series of recorded and videotaped moments in Ashton Robinson's life. Ellis's writing style is both deceptive and enthralling, seducing the reader into the role of voyeur, wanting to turn away, but unable.

A varied and well-imagined cast of characters, including real life celebrities (used fictitiously, of course), heightens the tension. Jill Lowry, Ashton's blonde and voluptuous second-in-command, and Nikki Kennedy, a student of axé with whom he eventually shares a deeper love and reality, are interesting complements to Robinson's unconventional life. As with Robinson's other female disciples, they participate willingly in his tantric-sex sessions. These sessions serve as a necessary mechanism for spiritual transcendence, or disappearance, as Robinson refers to it. The quixotic quest for disappearance, the complete out-of-body or extrinsic experience, is the thrust of the novel.

Spawned by the self-help industry, and strengthened by ominous millennial hype, New Age spiritualism preys on the naïveté and divine thirst of the American public. Selling God -- prepackaged and available in any number of variations -- is akin to hawking detergent or soda pop. "New and improved." "Lemony fresh." "One-third less fat."

More demeaning still, all the answers and mysteries of God (by whatever name you call her) are reduced to a 12-step course, available on tape, payable in three easy installments of $29.95 (plus shipping and handling). Divinity has never been so cheap. Yet this reality has never been more fully or pleasingly explored than in Right Here, Right Now.

Trey Ellis has crafted a remarkable and satirical work whose strength comes not from its punch but its rather insane plausibility. One day, courses will be taught on Ashton Robinson as a tragic hero and iconic symbol of New Age regression.

-- Jerome L. Langston