Back in the day, one of my writing professors assigned Anne Tyler’s most recent novel. It wasn’t a great read, and there was some grumbling, but the professor said, “Look, even less-than-stellar Anne Tyler is better than most any other author we could read.”
Riverhead Books ($20)
I understood immediately. All readers treasure a writer or two whose work has been so meaningful, so beloved, that everything they write feels worthwhile, even if the work isn’t their finest.
As you may have guessed, Anne Lamott is one of those writers for me. I’ve been using her best-known book “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions for Writing” to teach introductory creative writing classes for years now. I never feel that I’ve learned all it has to offer, and my students generally agree. Lamott is also well known as a writer of essays about her late-arriving Christianity (which, delightfully, she remains slightly perplexed by). I adore her first book in this vein, “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith.” It, too, is a book I return to. My identity as a liberal Christian was strongly shaped by her funny, self-effacing and brutally honest take on practicing religion.
Given that Lamott has given me (and many other readers) so much, is it fair to ask her to do so over and over again? Her latest book, “Dusk Night Dawn: On Revival and Courage,” was published in March, making it her ninth book in 20 years on faith and the elements thereof. The last few have been small volumes, with large type and wide margins — beautifully designed, but reflecting the increasing (decreasing?) slimness of the text. It’s beginning to feel like that the well is running a little less wet.
Beyond the market saturation of this kind of writing, I suspect the book feels less compelling because of the material Lamott chooses to work with, the scope of her own life. In her early books, she tackled huge subjects: her rampant addictions, her single motherhood, her improbable road to Christianity. Now, settled into a more comfortable middle age, rightly adored as a speaker and writer, her concerns are worthwhile but less urgent and, at least for me, less relatable.
In most of the essays here, Lamott writes extensively about being a newlywed. She writes: “Marriage has helped me feel safe, in having been found by a kind man who I love to talk with, my soul free to relax into the ploppy comfort of being known.” Reading this, I truly felt happy for her. But a little of that gushing goes a long way.
Of course, Lamott is more than smart enough to know that, and the book is stronger when her essays probe into more difficult realms — her petty jealousies, her recovery, her vivid joys, the ways she relies on her friends and family, those occasional moments when she stumbles into being helpful to others.
Her fans will be delighted, as I was, to see that she still can’t deal very well with life’s mishaps, that her dear friend, Father Tom, is still giving her the best advice, and that her beloved son, Sam, can be counted on for the pithiest summary of the way his mother has messed up this time. It’s not an easy thing to give readers what they want from familiar characters, who aren’t actually characters at all but real people. Lamott mostly allows her books to reflect the changes the people in her life go through, which makes them more complex and engaging.
There are many other strengths, of course. No one can top Lamott in deploying amazing quotes. She writes, “Marcus Aurelius said that we are little souls carrying around corpses,” and my brain pops in wonder. A fellow congregant at Lamott’s church, weary and sad, tells her, “I have made a life and career out of being a good sport … and I am worn out.” Who among us in 2021, Lamott rightly asks, doesn’t feel this way? Her core audience of women readers will deeply relate. I circled the passage several times.
I also love that she is equally adept at portraying joy and anger, and that she feels both about complex topics, from parenting to climate change. I loved the part of “Four Nights, Three Days” when it becomes clear that she is aggrieved, not so much about the wildfires raging nearby but about the terrible way a friend’s husband has treated his spouse. She’s a control freak, our Anne, and she knows it. Her continual rediscovery of that and other familiar tropes is somehow still delightful, even if their freshness is diminished because I know what will eventually happen: She’ll snap out of it and grow.
For me, the stunner of the book is one of the final essays. “One Winged Love” is wonderfully written, intense and honest, focusing on her continued attempt to understand and love her long-gone parents.
“Love can bring people out of isolation, get them to take off the Halloween masks they wear … but my mother, English to the core, till the last dog died, wouldn’t take hers off,” Lamott writes. It’s because of this rueful compassion that I believe her when she concludes, “Love is not a concept. It’s alive and true …” The humor here is rueful and sad. She sees so, so clearly how broken everyone mentioned is, and yet she chooses love.
No one asked me, but maybe she ought to resist her publisher’s calls (I assume) to write a 10th slim little volume of essays and plumb her considerable gifts and talent for something fresher. I’d love to read an entire Lamott book on mortality or grandparenting, for example, and I’d really enjoy getting another novel from her, as her fiction is underrated and wonderful. But even if the next book is number 10 of the same, I will still gladly and happily read it. Anne Lamott is better than anyone else at what she does.
Shannon Reed is the author of “Why Did I Get a B? And Other Mysteries We’re Discussing in the Faculty Lounge” now out in paperback. She is a lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of Pittsburgh.
First Published: September 2, 2021, 10:00 a.m.