C'mon Pilgrim

I was going to wait for the paperback version of Sarah Vowell's latest book, but then -- just about the time I was making my list for Santa Claus -- I read Virginia Heffernan's nasty review in the New York Times. The review seemed unfair and mean spirited, and raised in me feelings of protectiveness; some of my best friends are bookish brunettes.

Heffernan considers Vowell a problem ("like Sarah Palin"), due more to her hipster-nerd NPR credentials and "her Great Plains accent" than to anything in the book itself. Heffernan wonders whether we even need books like this, what with David McCullough and Ken Burns and their fellow "middlebrow historians making scholarly work perfectly accessible."

This misses the point by a mile, I think. Vowell is an engaging writer, and this book -- like Assassination Vacation and aspects of The Partly Cloudy Patriot before it -- is not so much history as an exploration of how history affects -- and is affected by -- contemporary American culture and politics. Rather than convey a history of Puritans in early America, The Wordy Shipmates attempts to make connections between the Puritans (and their writings) and modern day life. She elucidates the difference between Puritans of the olden days and the evangelicals of our modern era in a way that was surprising and educational to me, particularly as I might otherwise think the two movements as kissing cousins, if not partners in judgement and prudery. She uses examples of Pilgrim-themed episodes of the "Brady Bunch" and "Happy Days" not as "stand-up comedy," as Heffernan suggests, but as evidence of how wrong our conceptions are of these early colonists.

I would not be one who would ordinarily pick up a book concerning John Winthrop, Roger Williams, and Anne Hutchinson, feeling as though I'd learned enough about their fire-and-brimstone from my high school American Lit 1 course and a once-upon-a-time visit to the Salem Witch Museum. I can trust Vowell, however, to not just present the history but to indicate to me why it should matter to me. And that she does, by connecting the words and lives of the Puritans to those of Ronald Reagan, Al Gore, the Sons of Liberty, and -- sure -- Fonzie.

I agree with Heffernan that the book suffers a little from issues of tense, particularly an over-use (to my ear) of the historical present: "In May of 1634, Winthrop writes in his journal..." The immediacy that the present tense conveys isn't quite needed, and sometimes that false urgency can be grating.

All in all, though, this is about a fun a book as you'll find on Congregationalist Puritans, and the book draws some distinction between those who travelled to this continent for the purposes of their own religious freedom and those who were able to see that value fostered in others. With a cast of severe and righteous characters, folks who cleave off ears and burn down Indian encampments, there are few heroes in the book, but Vowell spotlights the emerging ideas -- themselves heroic -- that will lead to revolution, liberty, and democracy.