Just finished her novel Blue Shoe, and was somewhat disappointed. (This is the second of her novels I’ve read, I also read Crooked Little Heart.)
I really, truly love her essays (Traveling Mercies and Bird by Bird), but her fiction doesn’t work that well for me. Her strength as a writer, it seems to me, is in her ability to observe and describe the imperfect details of our lives, and to present faith in a non-preachy, non-off-putting way. Strung together in essays, this all works – but the lattice of plot in her novels always (heh. I’ve read two) seems cobbled together to provide something to hang her observations on, and not any kind of story she needs to tell, or even one that seems all that plausible to me. Specifically, in this book – well, has anyone else read it? could I interest anyone in a discussion of her? Because I’m not going to put together a long OP on something that is of interest to no one else.
I haven’t read any of her novels (I have Crooked Little Heart, which I started but never finished - got distracted) so I can’t really help with a discussion.
But her non-fiction (the two you mentioned plus Operating Instructions) makes her one of my all-time favorite authors. She’s an incredible essayist/chronicler of her own life. Funny, completely open and honest, observant. Awesome stuff.
Didn’t she used to wriote for Salon? If she’s the one I’m thinking of, I couldn’t stand her work: very preachy, holier-than-thou in a tree-huggy way. Couldn’t mention any subject, from putting gas in the car to her watch’s battery, without bringing FAITH into it.
I recently read “Blue Shoe”. It generally annoyed me and pissed me off. I’m supposed to be sympathetic to the main character because her husband left her for another woman, but then she turns around and takes another woman’s husband? (Maybe she deserved him more because he & she went to church every Sunday, whereas his wife did not.)
I hated the children. I hated the mother. Yuck. What a bunch of annoying, screwed up, self-righteous characters.
P.S. The whole thing with the blue shoe was just stupid. Plus, the way she came to have the shoe and other mementoes of her father was less likely than an invasion from Saturn. And the father’s sins were disgusting and unforgiveable – no way could I relate to her desire to discover her father.
eve – yes, the Anne Lamott who writes for Salon. If you don’t care for her essays, stay miles away from her fiction, which really is a lesser thing. I haven’t read her Salon stuff, so can’t comment directly on it – but she doesn’t always write about her faith. Bird by Bird, for instance, is a very good book on writing, and not terribly off-putting for the infidels. Although most emphatically not a Christian myself, I do believe in “God,” plus “some of my best friends” and all that, so my tolerance for god-talk may be significantly different from yours.
laina_f – I also was disppointed in the novel, though not all my reasons are the same. Although I don’t find either Mattie’s or her father’s actions admirable, I don’t find them appalling or unforgivable, either – people fall in love with the wrong people, and people sleep with the wrong people. I have done both at one time or another, and my father left my mother for another woman, and … life gets messy, it truly does, and you’d be surprised what you can forgive. So it wasn’t the details of the plot that bothered me.
What bothered me was:
[ul][li]The deus ex machinas in the plot. The appearance of the titular (heh) shoe, as you mention – but also the whole thing about William and his father.[/li][li]The further implausibility of some of Mattie’s actions, specifically – such as her taking so long to sleep with whatshisname, or [/li]her spending so much time spying on Annie before trying to talk to her – and that whole footwashing thing, yikes, a bit heavyhanded on the ol’ symbolism, eh?
[li]The difficulty of keeping all the names straight. I’d read a name and have to mentally translate it – oh, right, that’s the brother/the ex’s son/the best friend. It’s not a good sign in a novel when you can only keep track of people by their functions in the plot, not, like, their personalities or anything.[/ul][/li]
All in all, a disappointing experience. It’s not exactly surprising that such a wonderful essayist can’t do fiction – but I wish she’d quit wasting her own time (and mine) on the attempt.
I’ve only known Lamott thorugh her Salon essays, which I found profoundly affecting: she absolutely repulsed me in a way few others ever have. This despite the fact that politically she and I are on the same side of most issues. She represents everything I find unattractive about certain liberals. I suppose it speaks to the honesty of her writing that she was able to convey the essence of who she is in a way that made me really, really want to smack that bitch upside the head. Or maybe the REASON I despise her so much was that her writing is so inauthentic – what she represented as her real self was some shallow political shit.
She struck me as an unfettered bundle of emotions and hormones who conflated her manic/depressive (mostly depressive) emotional rollercoaster rides with political and social phenomena. She went on crying jags because the Bush admin was so evil. I know that it’s unreasonable to expect people to be models of stoic strength and reticence, but if stoicism is on one side of the bell curve, Lamott was WAAAAAAAAAAAAY on the other side.
She wrote of a cross-country journey her family took as she and her husband tried to patch their failing marriage together, and she never mentioned any specific reason for their problems, and given her compulsive need to spill her guts when she writes, I have to figure that if there HAD been a specific problem, she would have HAD to mention it. So she was dragging her family around as part of one of her endless emotional crises, to no avail as it turns out. I bet her kids and husband experienced the trip as sheer, unadulterated hell.
I bet her kids are emotional basket cases. I don’t know about her husband, because I can’t begin to undetrstand how any human being could find such a creature attractive.
Yech. Feh. Ich. I’m sure she impresses people with her commitment to social causes and the “faith” she uses so blatantly in place of the aggressive chemical and electroshock therapy she really needs.
Well, I’m not into the whole “faith” thing (I’m an atheist, but I wish I could believe in a God. It seems like it’d make things a lot happier and easier), but I liked Operating Instructions when I read it… 5 years ago, in middle school. Now I’m scared to go back and reread it. I’d hate to find that one of my favorite books from that period was just insane drivel.
But now that I think about it, she does come off as a little nuts. Then again, so do I, most of the time.
I personally hated Bird by Bird; I found it self-serving and preachy. Then again, I’m not much for essays about writing from people who can’t write (I’ve hated the fiction excerpts of hers I’ve read). I’m not big on that whole “writing life” thing though. I want to learn about the nuts and bolts of writing, not the “finding your inspiration” aspect. That book was hippy dippy nonsense.
Can I mention again just how much I hated Bird by Bird? I really hated it.
I wandered over to Salon to see Lamott’s response to the election. But a search didn’t turn up anything by her after the election. It’s only been a couple of weeks. I bet they’ve got her on suicide watch somewhere – no shoelaces, belts or pointy instruments.