American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda

Anthropologist­–turned–New Age celebrity author Carlos Castaneda was a fraud and a cult leader, but also a powerful writer who tilled psychologically fertile material, according to this entrancing biography. Novelist Marshall (A Separate Reality) probes the 1968 book that launched Castaneda to prominence, Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, a supposedly nonfictional account of Castaneda’s apprenticeship to the eponymous Mexican shaman, who urged the use of hallucinogens. The book became a touchstone of 1960s counterculture, and then spent subsequent decades being debunked. (Don Juan didn’t exist; his pensées were cribbed from Nietzsche and Sartre.) Marshall paints Castaneda as a charismatic liar—he fibbed about his age, name, upbringing, military service, and marriage—who, as a writer, turned mystical abstractions into arresting stories and imagery, including, Marshall perceptively argues, oblique references to his own tortured longing to erase his personal history. Later chapters explore Castaneda’s leadership of a sexually manipulative cult that claimed to confer immortality via martial arts. Marshall combines a colorful account of Castaneda’s sly triumphs with shrewd analysis of the toxic psychodramas by which he overawed his followers. (After his death in 1998, four cult leaders disappeared and are believed to have died by group suicide.) In the portait that emerges, Castaneda appears as captivating as Don Juan himself—a principal architect, for all his chicanery, of modern pop spirituality. This enthralls. (May)