Anne Lamott, still a pilgrim
of well-trod terrain
by David Loftus
[A version of this review appeared in the
Oregonian on April 1, 2007.]
Though her career as a novelist goes back 27 years and six books to Hard Laughter, Anne Lamott (partly because of an ongoing column in Salon.com) has become better known as an essayist.
Perhaps it's just as well. Despite the craft evident in her fiction (which tends toward chick-lit on a richer, more literary level than the Helen Fielding-Candace Bushnell variety), in time the novels became obscured by the essays.
One can't help comparing Lamott's life and loved ones to the situations and characters in her novels: that character resembles Pammy; did Lamott put some of her mother in this one? Rightly or not, readers catch themselves wading through an extra layer to get to her fictional characters.
Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith is her third collection of "thoughts on faith," which follows on the heels of Traveling Mercies (1999) and Plan B (2005). For anyone who hasn't read Lamott, it's a decent introduction, though closer to more-of-the-same than new ground.
Mercies featured a fairly detailed spiritual autobiography, but since then "faith" has become a loose hook for all manner of subjects, from learning to ski to a dance class for "special ed" adults.
Not that there aren't spiritual lessons to be found everywhere. But Lamott tends to repeat certain personal maxims -- listen to your broccoli; no is a complete sentence; bananas are the only known cure for existential dread -- which can be either reassuringly familiar or mildly irksome.
As a single mother, recovering/alcoholic/bulimic/drug abuser, writing teacher (her book on writing, Bird by Bird, is especially charming), open-minded Christian daughter of atheist parents, and a staunch opponent of the Bush administration, Lamott always has plenty to talk about, and her popularity in blue-state Portland is no mystery.
Fans undoubtedly foresaw a day when Lamott would slam into the wall of her beloved son Sam's adolescence. Sure enough, the little angel whose birth and early months were engagingly chronicled in Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year (1993), and whose absent father and older brother reentered their lives in Plan B, turns up several times in a rebellious and combative mood here.
When she finds the right phrase or metaphor, especially at her funny-sourest, Lamott is wonderful. She laments that some of her "coolest girlfriends" have mated with "people not worthy to drink their bath water, and I mean that in a warm and nonjudgmental way."
Jesus turns up fleetingly in her books, usually because she imagines him rolling his eyes at her stumblings. Here, he's tossing back mojitos and refusing to "open a package of Hostess Ding Dongs for me." The chapter titled "A Field Theory of Beauty" makes especially good work of the seemingly exhausted subject of physical appearance, eating, and true beauty.
Questions that remain are: How does one evolve from folks who lack faith, are even contemptuous of it, to a faith of one's own? Does Lamott believe her parents had something that adequately substituted for it, or did their spiritual lives suffer from a fatal deficiency?