Blue Shoe
by Anne Lamott

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Book Summary Information

• ISBN13: 9781573223423
• Condition: USED - Good
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Book Reviews of Blue Shoe

Book Review: His Blue Heaven
Summary: 5 Stars

The plot: a mother (Mattie) and two small children (Ella and Harry) survive, build new friendships and repair old ones. Mattie seeks answers to her father's psychological abandonment, the meaning of a key covered in blue paint, and a toy shoe.

But these plot gears merely turn the larger wheels of inquiry. Why do lives unfold the way they do? What events do we control? Can we accept the passage of time and all it brings? Very moving answers can be found.

The book refers to time and weather so often that they become characters:
"...through the dark and dreary skies, sunbeams slanted, bright and operatic."

"sunlight fell on the mountain as though through a doilie..."

"The storms of winter began, tossed down by towering clouds and marked by sudden shifts of light."

Nature and the changing seasons reveal inner states, primarily Mattie's. Nature plays the part of fortune teller, illuminating lives, predicting events, setting them in motion. This rings true; often it is what we see, in grains of wood, or a shadow on the blind, that reveals us. Our perception is our reality.

Working in counterpoint is another personified character, the Blue Shoe. This toy, left in her father's old car, compels Mattie to investigate his life and possible indiscretions. She holds the toy for comfort, panics when it is gone. She passes it from friend to brother and back to herself as a talisman of searching. It comes to stand for the characters' desires. One could even see it as our blue planet, tossed playfully between Greek gods. In Christian terms, the characters literally handle their own fate through their choices. Thus the little shoe becomes a solid emblem, anchoring Mattie in the changing winds of circumstances, crisis and lost love.

The color blue is a central theme. The blue paint on a key leads to a horrible truth, and also to resolution. The sky, the sea, driftwood, interior spaces, and people's eyes are seen in various shades of blue. In addition to indicating sadness and pain, blue here also indicates peacefulness, even a sort of heaven, the divinity of past meeting present, the grace of healing and community.

Ms. Lamott's descriptions are gentle and knowing, but more muscular than ever. Often foregoing physical painting, she uses dialogue, movement or unique insight.

"'Eesa go?' Ella asked (about Mattie's elderly mother). Mattie nodded: Isa go, always go, going, going, gone."

"...Isa, tipping it back to take a swig, looked positively Austrian with rude good health."

"Mattie's father took the joyful parts (of the marriage). He drank and danced, stood at his bookcases looking up a poem that he loved, or stared off into space after putting the needle down on a new album on the hi-fi."

"'People don't carry people, Al,' she (Ella) cried."

"All they want to do is have a chance to raise their families!" he (Harry) cried (about rats in basement).

The description of her mother in the hospital is understated and touching. It reveals vague anxieties of changing roles, from daughter to caretaker:
"'Okay, darling, now lie on your side,' said the technician, and the kindness in her voice shamed Mattie."

Her earlier novels often rely on celebrities and current events to describe characters and to texture ideas. In "Blue Shoe" these references are mostly gone. I suspect this reflects Ms. Lamott's growing confidence in her stature as a writer of timeless literature. If that is the case, I don't think she should ever have doubted.

Some passages are so good, they even do for images what movies do for people's lives. Often a movie, with its music and visuals, surpasses the actual event in beauty and power. Some of Ms. Lamott's passages do this, as in her description of rain coming down a window, and other passages that are so delicious they almost make the real thing less interesting. Brava!

Ms. Lamott's style is easy (not to write) and smart; characters are honest and vulnerable. I am comforted and delighted by the people here. They are unique personalities: creative, quirky, flawed, in need of each other, and often very, very happy. They find palpable joy in books, meaning in bonfires, and grace from being together. They talk in their own (Ms. Lamott's) loopy language, often loaded with meaning, deliberate or not. They seek what 19th century poets called "congeniality," the spark of like minds meeting. Finishing her books, I am sad, as when old friends leave after long visits. I fancifully wish that Ms. Lamott will write one hundred more volumes about them.

Feeling so close to people in this novel, it is tempting to judge them. But it is important not to judge the book in this way. "Blue Shoe" is not about finding correct answers all the time. It is about how these souls landed on their particular shores, gazing back at the very blue currents that brought them there.

It is a book of wonder, discovery, living, aging, and looking back with fear and affection. And it is mostly about the awfulness of time, how it wears on us, takes things, clouds memories, fulfills destinies set in motion long ago. And then: how we can rechart our course if we surrender ourselves to God, in His blue heaven.

Questions, more than answers, define these characters, in their conversation, courting, and vissicitudes. As seven-year-old Harry says; "...when would the smell of grass that was coming up from the dirt be the bottom of the sky?" As good a question as the rest, the answer is thank you, Ms. Lamott, for asking them.

Summary of Blue Shoe

United States Books

• Subjects > Literature & Fiction > United States
• Literary