Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: Hungry for essays? Just ‘Take the Cannoli’

Friday, April 14, 2000 | 9:44 a.m.

Scott Dickensheets' books and magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at dickens@vegas.com or 990-2446.

Books can change your life. Sometimes one will bull into your tidy existence, shake your perceptions, reorder your moral universe, stimulate your neurons, squeeze your heart, get you arguing with your dad, make you want to mess some people up. (The Associated Press style guide had that last effect on me.)

The book I am writing about today is not a book like that.

I'm talking about "Take the Cannoli: Stories From the New World" (Simon and Schuster, $23), a collection of personal essays by writer and National Public Radio commentator Sarah Vowell (most of these pieces were written for the radio show "This American Life").

The reference to Italian food in the title, the portentious use of "new world" in the subtitle and the severely cropped Statue of Liberty imagery on the cover give you the impression that it's about the immigrant experience, about alienation and assimilation and other vaguely sociological concepts ending in -ation.

It mostly isn't. "I was a feminist, not an Italian," Vowell writes in the title piece. She went to Montana State. Her father was a gunsmith. They argued about politics (she's a Democrat, he's an NRA Republican). I don't know if it's possible to be more American than that without chewing tobacco.

The title comes from a line in "The Godfather." For a long time Vowell was obsessed by the movie, watching it at every opportunity. A lapsed fundamentalist whose lost faith stranded her on squishy moral ground, she was suckered by the mobsters' unambiguous morality. "(The movie) offered a three-hour peep into a world with clear and definable moral guidelines: where you know where you stand and you know who you love; where honor was everything; and the greatest sin wasn't murder but betrayal."

A trip to Italy set her straight, of course. "Whatever I may have thought while sitting in front of my VCR, I am not actually Sicilian." Moral certainty is a seductive illusion, she decides. "Given the choice, I prefer chaos and confusion."

Another essay, alarmingly titled "Shooting Dad," details Vowell's youthful political head-butting with her staunchly conservative old man, typified by her aversion to his guns. "Death sticks," she calls them. The older she gets, though, the more she wanted to be a good daughter. Finally, she went with him into the Montana mountains to shoot ... his handmade canon. A small canon, but a potent death stick (and symbol) nonetheless.

"I've given this a lot of thought," she admits, "how to convey the giddiness I felt when the canon shot off. But there isn't a sophisticated way to say this. It's just really, really cool."

Compared to other essay forms -- which tend to advance arguments or present analysis -- the personal essay relies less on the virtues of information delivery than on the charm of the author. Vowell can be charming, indeed. Here she is, looking back at her Bible-thumping, small-town Okie upbringing: "So in such a superstitious town among such accident-prone citizens, Revelation seemed more like a gossip sheet than a ghost story."

Charming, all right. And funny! So why, a short week after I first read them, can't I recall the major characteristics of these pieces without referring to the book? I read them and then they were gone, evaporated like summer rain, poof.

I think it has something to do with the NPR format so many of them were written to fill. It's a form that favors the mild quirk and the glib epiphany, the gentle parable of personal growth, laid out and tied up in a few minutes of folksy talk. As soon as Vowell described arguing with her dad about firearms, you knew some sort of ballistic rapproachment was inevitable (just as you weren't surprised to hear her say, in twentysomething parlance, that it was "really, really cool."). When she has the change of heart regarding "Godfather" morality, there's no real sense of her having earned it, of the new wisdom being the result of a heartfelt internal struggle. She just needed a tidy ending to an amusing story.

That sort of thing can be entertaining on the radio, but to these ears, the transition to the page requires a little more textual complexity, or a little more humor or, at any rate, a little more something. (David Sedaris is the prime example of a writer who made the switch effortlessly.)

I don't mean to belittle "Take the Cannoli" as much as I simply wish it were a more memorable book.

Reading matters:

While you're in Esquire, check out Bill Zehme's entertainingly convoluted, irony-drenched cover story on blond starlet Heather Graham, which is simultaneously a cover story on blond starlet Heather Graham and a deconstruction of the dubious art of celebrity profiling.

Yep, $22. Here's why. Those wacky funsters at McSweeney's have published Issue 4 as a box of 14 article-length pamphlets, each lovingly designed. Authors include Lawrence Weschler, Rick Moody, Denis Johnson, Jonathan Lethem and the great Haruki Murakami.

It also comes with a very bizzare and possibly irrelevant booklet of "Notes and Background and Clarifying Charts and Some Complaining." Trust me, the charts are anything but clarifying, which is part of their charm, and if you're not prepared to get that, you should save your $22.

Oh, and Sarah Vowell contributes a funny little piece.