Anne Lamott’s "Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith" is a follow-up to her 1999 volume, "Traveling Mercies: Thoughts on Faith" — a book I liked a lot.
The new one is not nearly as good, burdened by a sentiment it takes all of three sentences to reach. Here is the first paragraph of the book:
On my forty-ninth birthday, I decided that all of life was hopeless, and I would eat myself to death. These are desert days. Better to go out by our own hands than to endure slow death by scolding at the hands of the Bush administration.
Yes, well. Later in the book, she asks God for "help in coping with George W. Bush." Later still, she seeks the strength to "really forgive" Bush, even though he is "a dangerous member of the family, like a Klansman, or Osama bin Laden."
Near the end of the book, when she discloses she was "so angry with and afraid of the right wing in this country that it was making me mentally ill," you begin to believe her. Six pages from the end, she fails once again in her "ludicrous" attempt to "believe in George Bush."
Lamott can be gracious and funny, sometimes simultaneously, but this book will excite only those who think the above quotes are zingers. It is ultimately a disappointing chronicle of the (apparently limited) efficacy of prayer to ameliorate Bush Derangement Syndrome.