Bode Miller Won't Break Your Heart

“Bode: Etc.” has its share of redundancies—for one thing, there are about a million sentences that start with “The truth is…” or “In truth…” That said, the truth is (see how annoying that is?) that there’s a lot to like about this book, starting with what is, by any reckoning, a good story.

As has been widely reported, Miller grew up in a beaver dam in New Hampshire, or to be more accurate, surrounded by a loving coterie of family and friends in a state of unfettered freedom that might frighten Rousseau. Much of the book is devoted to their various exploits, which include dressing up young Bode in a papier-maché turtle suit and throwing infant Bode headfirst into a snowdrift (which would also make a great event for the next Winter Olympics ... finally, something useful to do with a baby!).

There’s a great essay in David Foster Wallace’s new book, Consider the Lobster, called “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” in which he complains that the tennis star's memoir suffers from the “air of robotic banality” that characterizes most entries in the genre.

Not so with Bode. There is evidently a real person behind this book, one with a remarkable metaphorical imagination, a cheerful self-image (he’s a prophet, a ninja, the Flash, Spider-Man), and a tendency to make baffling asides, some of which veer so far off the path of comprehensibility that they come full circle and clobber the reader with the serenity of their nonsense:

“I’ve always been an accelerated healer—it comes from good nutrition. If I shave with a blade in the morning—which I haven’t done in years—and I nick myself, it’s healed before lunchtime.”

Most appealing is Miller’s philosophy of life, which prioritizes the pursuit of happiness over the pursuit of medals and is apparently controversial. Is there an element of denial in Miller’s insistence that logging time on the podium is ancillary to his real interests? Based on the evidence of this book, we would say arguably, but why argue? This is a skier, not Scott McClellan, and there doesn’t seem to be much point in doubting his contentions. If anything, it seems likely that we stand to gain by believing that, in a sea of lugubrious strivers, sad-eyed statisticians and milktoast (sic) aspirants, there are some people who maintain indifference to distinctions not of their own devising and are in a position to wonder, as Miller does at one point, “…could I lead a more charmed life?”