BOOKS: Trump's 'Apprentice' shares spiritual autobiography

On the inside flap of Tarek Saab’s book, “Gut Check: Confronting love, work and manhood,” he is described as a former contestant on Donald Trump’s reality show, “The Apprentice.”

Saab appeared in the show’s 2006 season, and though he didn’t win, he writes near the end of his book, “I leveraged my 15 minutes of c-celebrity status into my own small company, and I began traveling all over the country speaking to audiences about my experiences in life and in business.”

His travels bring him to this weekend’s pre-Lenten Men’s Conference, where he will give a talk. If his presentation is anything like his book, it should be very good.

“Gut Check” is an engaging spiritual autobiography of a young, ambitious man in his 20s. And while Saab’s writing style propels the reader quite easily through the book’s nearly 200 pages, it’s his exemplifying a type of modern man that makes “Gut Check” an engrossing study.

Take Saab as he appears in the first third of the book, a student at a small, Catholic, liberal arts college in the Northeast. Surrounded by lewd and boorish buddies, he stumbles through a boozy haze of parties and girls.

They listen (ironically?) to hip-hop, wake up at 3 in the afternoon and fill their hours with Madden ’97 and drinking games. And also this:

“We devoted much of our time to analyzing, dissecting and ranking the female talent pool. We categorized the best looking as ‘The Dream Team’: Lunchroom Goddess; Judy the Beauty; Dream Weaver” ... and on and on and on.

Basically, it seems that Saab went to college in a Hollywood movie. He does describe one effect of college well, especially in a society that supports prolonged adolescence.

“College is a gentleman’s purgatory, and every boy confronts the anxieties of manhood with varying degrees of preparation,” he writes. “Some internalize their issues, wallowing in depression and self-loathing, while others lash out in self-destructive behavior.”

One hopes there are more than these two options for the multitudes of young men pursuing higher education. But, on looking back at my own college experience, Saab’s description certainly fits at least a very sizable minority of my classmates.

And while Saab careens from bravado to self-doubt and from nascent religious sentiment to sensual temptation during his college years, another drive appears as he nears graduation: career obsession.

If the first part of the book carries with it a hint of “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder,” then the middle section is all “Wall Street,” the famous 1980’s movie about corporate greed and workaholism.

Saab gets hired at a large electronics firm in Dallas with a signing bonus, wardrobe allowance and hefty salary for a 23-year-old. He was driven and rose through the ranks quickly, gaining more responsibility and subordinates as the months rolled by.

And yet, Saab felt a nagging sense of unhappiness.

This is where his story diverges from many of his co-workers. The thing about Saab’s “conversion” story that makes it interesting is that there was no real lightning flash of conversion. In fact, throughout all the years recounted in “Gut Check” he remained a practicing Catholic.

Back in college, when surrounded by misinformed or terribly disinterested Catholics, Saab had an inkling of what or who he should become, not a perpetual adolescent, but a Catholic man.

His problem in attaining that ideal was two-fold. First, it can be incredibly difficult to transform a cerebral belief into a lived reality.

Or, as Saab writes after de-cluttering his life by giving away many of his belongings, “Through my struggles I came to realize that God could not be studied abstractly and totally understood. To know God fully is to either love Him or reject Him.”

Second, it remains difficult for Saab’s generation to discuss or understand ideas about Christian masculinity, self-sacrifice or simple gentlemanliness without it all being shrouded in irony or sniggering.

So while much of Saab’s story initially appears as common as Hollywood screenplay about fun-loving, aimless 20-somethings, he manages to transcend his milieu and become the man he believed God called him to be.

How?

“Though the strategy was simple, it wasn’t easy: prayer and sacrifice,” Saab writes about his interior transformation. In other words, humility and discipline.

“Faith is a choice, not a matter of emotion,” Saab writes. “Our emotions do not bring us to God; it is God who steadies our emotions. I learned this, and experienced the freedom of it, by focusing all of my thoughts towards salvation.”

Catholic Men’s Conference

When: 8 a.m.-6:30 p.m., Feb. 21

Where: St. Paul Parish, 330 W. Coral Gables Dr., Phoenix

Cost: $45 per person

Registration: www.CMFP.org or call (602) 451-0217

Media critic Andrew Junker is a staff writer for The Catholic Sun. Comments are welcome. Send e-mail to letters@catholicsun.org.

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