She Treads Softly: Hallelujah Anyway

Thursday, March 30, 2017

Hallelujah Anyway

Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy by Anne Lamott

Penguin Publishing Group: 4/4/17
eBook review copy; 192 pages
ISBN-13: 9780735213586

Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy by Anne Lamott is a so-so exploration of mercy, as radical kindness.

Lamott says: Mercy is radical kindness. Mercy means offering or being offered aid in desperate straits. Mercy is not deserved. It involves forgiving the debt, absolving the unabsolvable. Mercy, grace, forgiveness, and compassion are synonyms, and the approaches we might consider taking when facing a great big mess, especially the great big mess of ourselves—our arrogance, greed, poverty, disease, prejudice. It includes everything out there that just makes us sick and makes us want to turn away, the idea of accepting life as it presents itself and doing goodness anyway, the belief that love and caring are marbled even into the worst life has to offer.

Drawing on her own experiences on how difficult it is to extend mercy and accept it in the real world, Lamott uses plenty of personal examples and stories along with Biblical stories to support her thoughts. "When we manage a flash of mercy for someone we don’t like, especially a truly awful person, including ourselves, we experience a great spiritual moment, a new point of view that can make us gasp." She shares a few good examples of the difficulty of extending mercy to some of the especially unlovable people you might come across in your life, but also the same difficulty in extending mercy in disagreements with those you truly care about.

This is not her best work and it fell flat for me. It sort of felt like she phoned this one in and stretched the reach of some of the stories in order to make them apply to the point she wanted to illustrate. I agree with some of her conclusions and thoughts, but ultimately reject how she expressed herself in several instances in this book. Additionally, I've heard plenty of colorful language during my life, but it didn't feel all of the usage was entirely appropriate or needed when used in Hallelujah Anyway. Of course, I can extend mercy and ignore the language in multiple instances. But why were the multiple usages necessary to begin with? Finally, when she describes Jesus as getting "pissy" in his reaction, she lost me entirely. There are so many more appropriate and descriptive words in the English language, so why go low?

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of the Penguin Publishing Group.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.