Plan B: Further Thoughts On Faith Anne Lamott Penguin ISBN 1573222992 hardcover, 272 pages $35 (CDN)

Anne Lamott writes regularly for Salon.com, and in a recent column includes herself with the “left-wing Christians with fragile nerves and bad attitudes [who] are becoming ever so slightly tense about the distinct possibility that this country we love is becoming, under the Bush administration, a theocracy”. That passage gives you an idea of Lamott’s personality and writing style: she’s plainspoken, doesn’t take herself too seriously, and she’s not afraid of taking a controversial stand.

I first came in contact with Anne Lamott’s writing via those Salon columns and through them became a fan of sorts: she’s direct and clear, and puts herself on the line for the things that she believes in. At the same time she has the ability to express her firm opinions with wit and self-deprecating humor (the liner notes to a recent film portrait refer to her as “the best-selling author and laugh out-loud funny humorist”) — and a good sense of humor is hard to find.

Many of those columns make reference to Lamott’s Christian faith — in a sense she’s Salon’s resident theologian, or at least the closest thing to a theologian that you’d be likely to encounter in the popular media. A number of those pieces were collected into a previous volume, Travelling Mercies, which became a best seller in the States when published in 1999 (Amazon.com currently lists it at 580 in their sales ranking six years later; Joyce’s Ulysses is at 904) so it seems that there’s a fairly large audience south of the border who share similar (by which I mean overtly faith-based) views.

This is a very American phenomenon: I tried without success to think of an equivalent Canadian writer, someone who writes about faith and social issues from a very personal perspective, someone with a strong general readership. The best I could come up with was Sharon Butala, who has written a series of well-received books (beginning with The Perfection of the Morning) that contain strong spiritual elements. But there’s a world of difference between Butala and Lamott, not unlike the differences between the words “spirituality” and “religion”; or “American” and “Canadian” for that matter. With Butala the spiritual elements lie in her connection with the natural world: the landscape of rural Saskatchewan; Lamott’s religious connection is the one she feels with her (capital G, church-based) God.

This distinctly American note is also seen in the way that politics and religion are entwined in many of Lamott’s pieces. Canadians have been much more successful at treating the two topics independently, while for Americans the two seem to be as difficult to separate as conjoined twins. Witness the 2004 Presidential election where both candidates were careful to make regular public announcements on the important role that faith plays in their daily lives.

Plan B: Further Thoughts On Faith is essentially a sequel to Travelling Mercies, and finds Lamott dealing with the depressing reality (depressing for a “scruffy aging Birkenstock type” Democrat at least) of four more years of life under Bush.

On my forty-ninth birthday, I decided that all 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 at the hands of the Bush administration. However, after a second cup of coffee, I realized that I couldn’t kill myself that morning — not because it was my birthday but because I’d promised to get arrested the next day.

There are also updates on her son Sam (she’s a single mom, and Sam is now in his mid-teens and the cause of many heated disagreements). In one piece they travel together (to Vancouver of all places) to meet with Sam’s dad, whom Sam had never met before. Of course there’s a voyeuristic impulse which keeps you turning pages to find out just how everything turns out, and usually there’s some kind of insight to close.

It’s a very digestible blend of the serious and the mundane, which, by the end of the book feels a bit formulaic. I think that the work of Annie Dillard (which, like that of Anne Lamott, often touches on existential issues) will prove to have a longer shelf life. But Lamott’s sense of humor, and her writing skills, help make this book stand a bit above the crowd.