The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 20 May 2009
by Steve Almond
When Boston College invited Condoleeza Rice to speak at a commencment ceremony, adjunct professor Steve Almond resigned in protest. Condi was a liar, after all, lying repeatedly to the American public in support of our invasion of Iraq. Lies which are even verifiable as lies. The media, mostly the right-wing "hateocracy", latch on to Almond's quixotic action and bring him forward as another of those left wing nuts willing to make a real sacrifice in the name of personal morals. Almond relates this story with an even-handed outrage at the focus of the media on his one little action. Rather than explore the allegations of Rice's many lies, they focus on him, one man who they portay as some kind of nut for protesting immoral government behavior. The essay is funny, biting, bitter and somewhat cathartic now, after the end of the Bush administration. And it is just one of the raucous essays in this book. Almond has a self-deprecating manner, but also a confessional one. Sometimes to the point of mild discomfort in the reader. His linked essays on his sexual education are explicit. You wonder how he can bring himself to discuss this stuff in such detail, and then you're given a twelve-step guide to writing about sex. All of it funny, fast-moving, and often (but not always) insightful. The longest essay in the book is a moving relation of Almond's fascination and exploration of author Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut enjoyed a wide popularity, but his books were not widely accepted as landmarks in American literature. Almond, who wrote an undergraduate thesis on Vonnegut, tries to convey the compassion, bitterness and disappointment evident in the older writer's work. Readers who are also fans of Vonnegut, particularly those of a certain post-Boom age group, are likely to relate to Almond's essay, and to be moved by it. Along the way, we do discover an obsessive quality to Almond's writing (and maybe his life, too). He writes about how being a fan of the Oakland A's baseball team has resulted in the demise of the Red Sox Nation (and its Curse of the Bambino). He writes of his brush with reality TV, when his book Candyfreak landed him a spot on a show about obsessives. Oprah Winfrey is in there, along with Almond's own child (in perhaps the weakest, but funniest of the essays). All in all, Almond's kind of self-deprecating essays are part of a kind of subgenre of self-abasing humor writing. They're a bit more frantic, but similar to the work of David Sedaris. People of a certain generation will be more in tune with the pop cultural references. But Almond's critique of America and humanity's ultimate flaw (lack of compassion (or brains, for that matter)), is often sharp, occasionally bitter, sometimes forlorn, and just as often witty.