God Said, "Hey"
Christopher Hitchens Argues with Anne Lamott from Beyond the Grave
Tools
Help, Thanks, Wow
by Anne Lamott
(Riverhead Books, $17.95)
Mortality
by Christopher Hitchens
(Twelve, $22.99)
For the past decade, Anne Lamott's writing career has been predicated on the simple fact that when you're betting on the American public's buying tastes, you can't go wrong by leaning heavily on babies and Jesus. Lamott has evolved from a novelist to a best-selling essayist on spirituality and motherhood (and, eventually, grandmotherhood), and her ideas are getting flimsier as her career progresses. Her newest book, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, is essentially a pamphlet, a tiny, expensive hardcover pep rally for cafeteria Christianity.
Lamott's prose has codified over the years into something folksy and cheery and cutely self-mocking, like the neighbor you feel guilty about hating. Early on in Help, Thanks, Wow, she offers to "lend you my higher power, this sweet brown-eyed Jew who will want you to get glasses of water for everyone, and then come to the beach for some nice fish." But Lamott's not picky about where her spiritual satisfaction comes from. She calls Rumi her "general-purpose-go-to-mystic." She just wants you to believe in some sort of higher power. Any higher power is just fine in the church of Lamottism. The first step to becoming a practitioner of Lamottism, she says, is to admit "the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little." After a little work, "it's not such a huge step to imagine yourself believing in any sort of higher power, to whom you could say, 'Hey.'"
Stranger Personals
So casual! So friendly! Lamott says "Hey" to her god when she's feeling down, when she woke up with "loneliness... sitting on my chest like a dental X-ray apron, even though I was buried in hairy dog love." Saying "Hey" to the god of Lamottism is often as simple as "splurg[ing] on a pint basket of figs, or a pair of great socks," and it makes you feel you're in a state of "wonder," no matter how much "the New York literati or your atheist friends" may despise that word.
There's an underlying bitterness, and an overt ostentatiousness, in all of Lamott's examples. Her spirituality seems to roar back at its loudest when it's confronting critics. It is showy and it loudly declares its self-love. Lamott tells the same story, over and over again: Something bad happens, or she wakes up feeling bad. Something wondrous happens (either she notices something awe-inspiring, like "the veins in a leaf, birdsong, volcanoes," or she generates kindness by "letting others go first, in traffic or in line at Starbucks") and suddenly her belief in God is restored. Hey!
Those who take their spiritual solace from Lamottism shouldn't be ashamed of themselves. But once you're feeling right again, after you've said "Hey" to the flip-flop-wearing Jimmy Buffett god of Lamott's belief system, I'd advise you to start poking around for a sturdier platform on which to rest your well-being. Lamott's spirituality is too tempestuous and too shallow to build a life on.
In Mortality, his final book, Christopher Hitchens muses on the many people who have announced that they're praying for him. Hitchens, the Vanity Fair columnist and vehement atheist who died of esophageal cancer last year, lists several Bible quotes praising the perfection of the universe as part of God's plan and then denounces the prayers of those who want to use faith to save him: "A person using prayer time to ask for the world to be set to rights, or to beseech god to bestow a favor upon himself, would in effect be guilty of a profound blasphemy or at the very least a pathetic misunderstanding."
Mortality is the story of Hitchens's worsening cancer and his approaching death, and the book is structured very much like the process of dying. Which is to say that it's all over the place, with many early good stretches, occasional very bad stretches, and it ends way before you're ready, in a flurry of confusion and half-finished thoughts. Hitchens maintains his atheism—those insecure religious zealots looking for a deathbed recantation will leave unsatisfied—but the book is not another atheist tract (his excellent God Is Not Great already serves as the best example of that genre). Instead, Hitchens writes about whatever flits across his consciousness: what it feels like to have your body fail you, how small talk becomes a certain kind of torture when you have cancer, how a profound love of Dostoevsky may have hastened Neitzsche's death. Above all, he takes part in what Martin Amis correctly identified as the war on cliché, refusing to allow himself to give in to lazy or simple thought up till the very end.
Hitchens is not nice. In fact, he's still an asshole, and at times his idle thoughts can be the most maddening of them all. (This is the man who stood proudly with Bush's neocons in the beginning of the last decade.) Through the short journey of Mortality (the book is slighter, even, than Help, Thanks, Wow, but Hitchens had the best excuse in the world for his manuscript's brevity) the words take on a whispered, emphatic tone. Hitchens knows he's running out of time, and every word seems more urgent. As a human document, it's incredibly touching. Hitchens does more to exemplify the dignity and the fragility of life in Mortality than Lamott has in years. He does this by refuting the same tired clichés that Lamott revels in, by arguing with complacency until there's no breath left in his body. 
1
I felt sorry for her after that book, what with having a new baby and all and no apparent ability to make a living. "There's no way she's going to be able to publish any more books after this," I thought. "She's shot her wad."
And yet she's somehow parlayed this facile, woo-woo, ain't-I-cute-'cause-I-don't-think-too-hard persona (person?) into a viable literary career at a time when the publishing world is crumbling. She's made a career out of exploiting her life, her son and his life, and all the ancillary people who drift in and out of it, all plastered over with a patina of 12-step pablum. She's the literary world's version of reality TV.
What the fuck?
3
I've long abandoned any hope for productive dialogue with the true believers. Where I spend my time now, and the recipient of most of my ire, goes to the liberal-religionistas, who confuse belief with an inability to move beyond their own narrow view of themselves and the world.
But, never mistake the allure of selling "outsider just like you" to those who are desperate to be accepted by the liberal intelligentsia they love to hate.
6
It seems like that's not true, as she's built a life on it and seems to be okay.
12
16
I think you're comparing apples to oranges, Paul. I often agree that liberal religionists need to do far more to distance themselves from their fire-breathing cohorts than they do. But even if Anne could be accused of squishy theological thinking, which I don't think is fair (I think she'd admit her essays are personal and she's not trying to convince anyone of anything the way Hitchens is openly doing), she's still exploring issues of how to live a moral life that can ring true for a lot of people. If you don't like her style that's one thing but to argue that she goes in for the kind of "profound blasphemy" or "pathetic misunderstanding" that Hitchens blasts seems like overkill.
She tells emotionally relevant stories of learning how to forgive others, and how to make meaningful sense of the frequent tragedy of human life that any non-theist could still benefit from (as I do). To characterize her work as "I let someone cut in front of me at Starbucks so I didn't feel so bad about buying non-organic loganberry preserve this morning" (I'm paraphrasing) seems really unfair to me.
I think it's impossible to look at the history of the 60's counterculture--including large swathes of the anti-Vietnam and the pro-civil rights movements--without acknowledging the depth of spiritual questioning that was going on in those communities side by side with radical politics (Camille Paglia also has a great article about this—Cults and Cosmic Consciousness in Arion journal of humanities). I see Anne Lamott continuing that tradition of embracing a sometimes quixotic spiritual quest and asking how it can coexist with fundamentally leftist politics. She obviously grew up in that atmosphere, and I think she does a fine job of combining those two elements in her work--again, take or leave her prose and her theology, but don't try to compare her to Hitchens. She'd also probably lose in an intellectual duel with Schopenhauer. For my part, any lingering belief in a benevolent deity I do have (maybe 3%) is tied up with the thought that maybe there is some sliver of transcendent meaning in the idea that we're all brothers and sisters, an idea that people in the 60's were trying to embody in our political/social process. I think that idea moves beyond the political and emotional to something that can be called spiritual without embarrassment, and even without theism, necessarily. And I think that's where Lamott is coming from, just with an obviously theistic bent. Maybe that's nonsense, but it's not harmful nonsense, or nonsense that makes me or Anne Lamott less capable of being politically right-on or effective. She may be a little loopy for your tastes but she's certainly not complacent.
I think you're comparing apples to oranges, Paul. I often agree that liberal religionists need to do far more to distance themselves from their fire-breathing cohorts than they do. But even if Anne could be accused of squishy theological thinking, which I don't think is fair (I think she'd admit her essays are personal and she's not trying to convince anyone of anything the way Hitchens is openly doing), she's still exploring issues of how to live a moral life that can ring true for a lot of people. If you don't like her style that's one thing but to argue that she goes in for the kind of "profound blasphemy" or "pathetic misunderstanding" that Hitchens blasts seems like overkill.
She tells emotionally relevant stories of learning how to forgive others, and how to make meaningful sense of the frequent tragedy of human life that any non-theist could still benefit from (as I do). To characterize her work as "I let someone cut in front of me at Starbucks so I didn't feel so bad about buying non-organic loganberry preserve this morning" (I'm paraphrasing) seems really unfair to me.
I think it's impossible to look at the history of the 60's counterculture--including large swathes of the anti-Vietnam and the pro-civil rights movements--without acknowledging the depth of spiritual questioning that was going on in those communities side by side with radical politics (Camille Paglia also has a great article about this—Cults and Cosmic Consciousness in Arion journal of humanities). I see Anne Lamott continuing that tradition of embracing a sometimes quixotic spiritual quest and asking how it can coexist with fundamentally leftist politics. She obviously grew up in that atmosphere, and I think she does a fine job of combining those two elements in her work--again, take or leave her prose and her theology, but don't try to compare her to Hitchens. She'd also probably lose in an intellectual duel with Schopenhauer. For my part, any lingering belief in a benevolent deity I do have (maybe 3%) is tied up with the thought that maybe there is some sliver of transcendent meaning in the idea that we're all brothers and sisters, an idea that people in the 60's were trying to embody in our political/social process. I think that idea moves beyond the political and emotional to something that can be called spiritual without embarrassment, and even without theism, necessarily. And I think that's where Lamott is coming from, just with an obviously theistic bent. Maybe that's nonsense, but it's not harmful nonsense, or nonsense that makes me or Anne Lamott less capable of being politically right-on or effective. She may be a little loopy for your tastes but she's certainly not complacent.
No, I don't believe in a personal god, a being who cares about me, nor do I think everything happens for a reason and all will be well in the end. Nasty shit happens to people who don't deserve it, like my friend, and I don't think it's because of any lord who works in mysterious ways. But Lamott piqued my curiosity when I saw a quote from her - "You know you've created God in your own image when it turns out he hates all the same people you do."
I think she offers some thoughts and perspectives that are worth some consideration without having to buy into her idea of a higher power. Perhaps not, though, for an adolescent who wears all black and is too smart and too cool for pretty much everything.
RSS
Twitter
Comments (19) RSS