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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A gifted author, but a flawed book, Nov 24 2001
I would very much like to write the kind of glowing review of "Traveling Mercies" that some others here have written. Anne Lamott is a very gifted writer with an eye for detail, a penchant for turning a phrase, and a sass that permeates everything she sees. She also writes about matters of faith, a faith I share (although from a different tradition) and that desperately needs more airtime in our ferociously secular culture.But I didn't like the book, and for reasons that I had a hard time pinning down. She struggles earnestly with life's messes, trying to find grace in the mundane or the irritating or the sorrowful; she is clearly a loving and devoted mom (although c'mon: wouldn't you have let your kid go hang-gliding?); and she would probably make a fiercely devoted and rather interesting and unpredictable friend. But I kept getting the sense in reading through the vignettes in this book that I was watching a home movie, one where the camera was trained almost exclusively on a somewhat confused middle-aged baby boomer as she stumbles into and then out of the various crises in her life. But her crises are nothing we haven't all experienced, and many would have been completely avoidable with a tad more foresight and common sense. So by the end (and, truth be told, long before), my reaction was: so what? Augustine or Bonhoffer this isn't. About midway through the book, Lamott reads a review of a lecture of hers that described her as "narcissistic", and that, I think, hits the nail pretty much on the head. It's not that one cannot find inspiration here, or humor, or compassion; the main difficulty in Traveling Mercies is that the essays are so consistently self-absorbed as to miss many of the lessons she could have learned were she able to get beyond herself even a little bit. So we have her chalking up as a minor miracle her being able to play the 'bon vivant' with a fellow air-traveler who happens to be of a religious and political persuasion at which she would normally have sneered; it never seems to occur to her, however, that were the shoe on the other foot (as in: "I actually talked to a feminist today, and even though she's spreading Satan's lies, she really wasn't all that bad!"), the essay would have read as intolerably patronizing. Elsewhere she talks about how lovingly her church accepted her unwed pregnancy, unlike what might have happened had she been in a church in the South (one of a few such gratuitous swipes at the South). But then again, perhaps not: I used to live in the South, and she might well have found there the support and acceptance she craved but mixed with the kick in the butt and the admonition to "sin no more" that she needed. So this is a mixed bag overall. I think it's fair to say that pretty much everyone will find something to relate to in Lamott's recollections, and few are better than she is at the craft of writing. But if you're looking for wry stories of domestic crises, read Erma Bombeck instead; she's funnier. If you want a spiritual autobiography, try David Brainerd or Julian of Norwich; they're theologically meatier. If your quest is a tale of life's adversity overcome imperfectly, I'd recommend C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed. But if you want somewhat witty autobiographical essays by a neurotic left-coaster whose theology seems to have come straight out of a blender, look no further than Traveling Mercies.
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