Ken's Reviews > Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

When you read thin books, you always hope that they are succinct as hell -- big books that have been cut to the bone, trimmed to the essence, winnowed to their winning ways. You certainly entertain no thoughts of repetitiveness. That's forgivable with Dickens, Thackery, and Fielding. They write huge tomes that leave room for error. But the 100-page book? No.

That's my main beef with Anne Lamott's long essay on prayer. I read a NY Times essay of hers that I enjoyed mightily. It told how her family was anything-but religious, how they worshipped at the altar of great writers and lived a Bohemian lifestyle. Lamott cut against the family grain. She got religion -- of a sort. But, in writing about it, she travels six ways to Sunday but I keep seeing the same four-way intersection.

I should have been the perfect audience for this book, which is why I bought it. I am irreligious, yet spiritual; agnostic, yet defensive about God; skeptical, yet trusting in the great unknown. Lamott is similar. She has no patience for Christians who claim to know "the way" because, of course, they don't. Hers is a most laid-back and understanding God. He (sometimes She) doesn't mind if you say, "God, you've pissed me off this time." Eh. This is what happens when you're in the business of creating humans. Frankenstein's monsters, and all that.

But the three sections -- prayers for HELP, prayers of THANKS, and prayers of WOW -- were a bit circular and the writing a bit meandering. I wanted a more poetic precision from this. The smaller the genre and the smaller the size, the greater the demands. Plus Lamott is the writers' writer. Did she not write Bird by Bird, the Gospel of Wannabe Writers everywhere?

OK. Yes, there are some neat moments, like this paragraph on the WOW of autumn:

"And autumn ain't so shabby for Wow, either. The colors are broccoli and flame and fox fur. The tang is apples, death, and wood smoke. The rot smells faintly of grapes, of fermentation, of one element being changed alchemically into another, and the air is moist and you sleep under two down comforters in a cold room. The trails are not dusty anymore, and you get to wear your favorite sweaters."

But overall, I got a "Meh" kind of feeling, like the book needed help, like I owed it little thanks, and like I'd been gypped out of $17.95 (wow!) for 102 pages.

Welcome to the hazards of reading new books, pilgrim.