Review: Vowell, The Partly CLoudy Patriot
Dec. 13th, 2018 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepenny
The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah VowellMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Collection of short pieces: essays and reviews on a variety of subjects, but as the title suggests, America--both the idea and the reality--remains central throughout. Vowell is sharp and funny and has a gift for seeing things from odd angles. She has a great essay, for instance, on Tom Cruise, "Tom Cruise Makes Me Nervous," where she says, "Tom Cruise is the most talented actor of all time at keeping his distance" (128) which I think is a beautiful summation.
Because her writing seems always to criss-cross the verge of memoir, there's continuity with Assassination Vacation (the nephew who is three in AV is 7 months in TPCP), which contributes to the charming and sometimes disquieting sense that Vowell is truly baring her soul, telling us, her readers, things she can't tell anyone else. Telling secrets publicly is, after all, what memoir is for. Not always bad secrets or earth-shattering secrets, just the secrets about how the memoirist felt at a particular moment, what she thinks about when she's alone--all the things that we DON'T tell other people, but can tell a world-ful of faceless strangers. (I don't talk about my true crime obsession much with the people around me. I talk about it with you.)
Knowing that she works in radio and having listened to AV twice, I think that part of what makes Vowell a great essayist is her literal voice: the way she delivers her own sentences. I enjoyed TPCP (except for the eerie sense of deja vu in watching her angst about George W.'s administration and thinking, oh honey. Because, wow, yes, Dubya was a terrible, war criminal, deeply stupid president and, yes, I think he cheated Gore, so in some ways, Trump really is the repetition of history that those who do not study it are doomed to. Only they forgot to mention it's worse the second time around.), but I have the sneaking sensation I would have enjoyed it more with Sarah Vowell reading it to me.
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