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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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What Now?
By Ann Patchett |
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Rating: |
**** |
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(Highly Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Commence Ann
Patchett’s latest book, What Now?
is based on the 2006 commencement address she gave at her alma mater, Sarah
Lawrence College. The title is one of life’s perfect questions: applicable to
everyone at every age. No matter what commencement addresses you’ve heard
over the years, chances are this one will make your top five or ten. What I
found fascinating is that it almost didn’t happen. Patchett gave a copy of
her planned address to her former writing teacher, Allan Gurganus, days
before she was to deliver it. His advice: start over. Instead of avoiding the
references to her own life, make that the core of the address. The result is
superb. Here’s an excerpt, pp. 60-67: Receiving an education is a
little bit like a garden snake swallowing a chicken egg: it's in you but it
takes awhile to digest. I had come to college from twelve years of Catholic
girls' school. At the time I thought that mine was the most ridiculous,
antiquated secondary education in history. We marched in lines and met the
meticulous regulations of the uniform code with cheerful submission. We bowed
and kneeled and prayed. I held open doors and learned how to write a sincere
thank-you note and when I was asked to go and fetch a cup of coffee from the
kitchen for one of the nuns I fairly blushed at the honor of being chosen. I
learned modesty, humility, and how to make a decent white sauce. The white
sauce I probably could have done without, but it turns out that modesty and
humility mean a lot when you're down on your luck. They went a long way in
helping me be a waitress when what I wanted to be was a writer. It turns out
those early years of my education which had seemed to me such a waste of time
had given me a nearly magical ability to disappear into a crowd. This was
not the kind of thing one learned at Sarah Lawrence or the Iowa Writers'
Workshop, places that told everyone
who came through the door just how special they are. I'm not knocking being
special, it was nice to hear, but when it was clear that I was just like
everybody else, I was glad to have had some experience with anonymity to fall
back on. The nuns were not much on extolling the virtues of leadership. In
fact, we were taught to follow. When told to line up at the door, the person
who got there first was inevitably pulled from her spot and sent to the back
and the person from the back was sent up front to take her place. The idea
was that we should not accidentally wind up with too grand an opinion of
ourselves, and frankly I regard this as sound counsel. In a world that is flooded
with children's leadership camps and grown-up leadership seminars and
bestselling books on leadership, I count myself as fortunate to have been taught
a thing or two about following. Like leading, it is a skill, and unlike
leading, it's one that you'll actually get to use on a daily basis. It is
senseless to think that at every moment of our lives we should all be the
team captain, the class president, the general, the CEO, and yet so often
this is what we're being prepared for. No matter how many great ideas you
might have about salad preparation or the reorganization of time cards,
waitressing is not a leadership position. You're busy and so you ask somebody
else to bring the water to table four. Someone else is busy and so you ask someone
to clear the dirty plates from table twelve. You learn to be helpful and you
learn to ask for help. It turns out that most positions in life, even the big
ones, aren't really so much about leadership. Being successful, and certainly
being happy, comes
from honing your skills in working with other people. For the most part we
travel in groups—you're ahead of somebody for a while, then somebody's ahead
of you, a lot of people are beside you all the way. It's what the nuns had
always taught us: sing together, eat together, pray together. It
wasn't until I found myself relying on my fellow waitress Regina to heat up
my fudge sauce for me that I knew enough to be grateful not only for the help
she was giving me but for the education that had prepared me to accept it. Patchett is a fine writer, and
as shown in the excerpt, she offers wonderful prose in What Now? Steve
Hopkins, May 15, 2008 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the June 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/What Now.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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