Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy (2017)

Lamott, Anne. Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy. Riverhead Books, 2017.

Like yesterday's book, this one takes its title from a song: Candi Staton's eponymous gospel song. And, as the title entails, Lamott's position boils down to radical mercy, looking circumstances and people directly in the face and saying, "Hallelujah anyway." Lamott reminds me of Marilynne Robinson, another exquisite novelist turned religious essayist. Both authors are of sound mind and high learning, easily shaking off accusations of narrow-mindedness and absence of erudition. Where they differ, however, is in Lamott's more colorful and pop-art tone against Robinson's controlled, mighty sentences. In the opening paragraph, Lamott captures something that Walker Percy hit on in his 1961 book The Moviegoer: we are often struck by revelation while doing or looking at the most meaningless, mundane things. There is something refreshing about a novelist writing of theological matters, and Lamott easily compels me to continue beyond my self-imposed twenty-five pages. The production of the little hardcover from Riverhead Books is also a joy to the eye, in the same manner of the recent Spiegel & Grau publication of Harold Bloom's The Daemon Knows: the incorporation of color, especially blue, in place of the standard black-and-white offers a riposte to the age of digital print and makes me long for a revival of illuminated manuscripts.