Blue Shoe could well be Anne Lamott’s breakthrough novel, enchanting her fans, dreadlocked or not, with the fairy-tale type charm that a little blue shoe holds for the main character, Mattie Ryder — a recently divorced mother of two children. Inspired by a toy shoe Lamott got from a gumball machine for 25 cents, the little shoe becomes Mattie’s personal worry stone, bringing solace as it and a tiny paint-can key lead her on a trail of heartbreak and revelation when she delves into her deceased father’s past, discovering secrets she and her family had known all along. Lamott brilliantly portrays how easily we can fool ourselves when we don’t want to face unpleasant, painful truths.
Few authors can pull off what Lamott does here. In one paragraph she can suck you into the whirlpool of craziness of a dysfunctional family, then almost casually sling you to shore on a line of laughter. She’ll pelt you with so many funny one-liners, you begin to walk around your own life, feeling like one of her spies, tripping over metaphors at every turn.
Blue Shoe‘s style will remind Lamott devotees of her sage advice on writing: Keep index cards with you wherever you go; look at life through a one-inch picture frame; and take each step, writing and living, bird by bird. Unfortunately, though, the plot limps along, only occasionally rising above the humdrum song of a broken marriage, a love affair, a potential romantic love with a close friend. Only Lamott’s humor saves the day. It just takes too long for Mattie-Single-Mom to realize that it’s “wrong” to go to bed with someone just to fill a vacancy meant for someone else. I frankly became bored with the time Mattie spends with Nick, her egotistical ex-husband; with William, a self-centered lover; and with Daniel, the sweet-potato friend/lover. Entertaining, maybe; engaging, not.
Endearing, however, is Mattie’s interaction with her growing children, two-year- old Ella and six-year-old Harry. Their relationship energizes the book. When Otis, the pet iguana, disappears, Mattie secretly fantasizes about “how much bigger the living room would seem once cleared of Otis’s cage. She thought with a kind of moral righteousness about mothers in other countries who did not have the luxury of worrying about their kids’ pets. Otis, with his hot rock and his lettuce leaves, was living more luxuriously than half of the world’s children.”
She rationalizes: Maybe God wants Otis to be lost. Maybe it’s a way of God allowing Otis his freedom. Harry knows better: “God has stopped loving this family,” he says.
You can almost guess exactly where the little blue shoe and the paint-can key are leading. No great surprise there. But you can’t second-guess Lamott’s often disarming wit. Mattie says what most of us only think. And even when she just thinks it, we find ourselves identifying. For example, when Mattie drops by the Medical Center to visit her mother, Isa, she is at first moved when the daughters of Isa’s roommate begin singing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” But the grandson’s harmonica grates on her nerves, forcing her to wonder if the tinny sound is drilling “through the sponge of [the grandmother’s] coma.”
“The drill! The drill!” Lamott writes, evoking Conrad’s “The horror! The horror!”
Well into the novel, Lamott’s stride quickens as Mattie and her brother struggle with the dilemma of how to care for their ailing mother. Here we see Lamott at her best — outrageously funny and irreverent, yet depicting a heartbreaking, frightening scene. Mattie is never more human than when she listens to a sales pitch by the director of a convalescent hospital, The Willows. She absorbs every detail of the place: “Big-band music played softly, and framed photos of l940s movie stars covered the walls. Mattie imagined the chandelier descending from the ceiling, and the antique table rising, and the walls moving closer together, until she was squished like a gigantic breast in a mammogram.” Entering the “Activities” room, she and her close friend, Angela, see “four vacant people slumped over.” Angela quips: “What would you call this activity?” And in one of the most poignant moments in the novel, Mattie realizes that the answer is: Sitting. “And sitting was different from lying down near death. Sitting in community, in the sun, was different from lying down and staring at your own walls.”
Perhaps Lamott should have stayed in her own activity room a bit longer to do some closer editing. Just at its strongest, the novel’s ending feels rushed, as if Lamott is pushing a deadline, frantic to pull all the strings together. As a result, some plot lines break, something gets dropped, some improbable things are hatched. Still, we hang in there with Mattie in her unrelenting search for dark truths, those secrets her mother had known all along, “deep in the Otis part of her brain.”
This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2002.
