HarperCollins, $28.99, 320 pages
Reach at random into the pile of reviews for Ann Patchett’s eight books (six novels, two nonfiction) and you’re bound to pull out five that are glowing, three breathless and only a passing glimmer of critical ambivalence. In one. Maybe.
Her most recent novel, “State of Wonder,” made Publishers Weekly’s and NPR’s best of 2011 lists and landed the author on “The Colbert Report.” Almost a decade earlier, the best-selling “Bel Canto” established Patchett as a household name admired by readers and critics alike.
After such a streak, a skeptical reader might assume her new nonfiction collection, “This is the Story of a Happy Marriage,” is a commercial concoction — a batch of table scraps boxed together by a savvy publishing house to be sold in place of an entree. Patchett divulges in the book’s introduction that she paid her rent for a decade by writing for publications such as Seventeen and Bridal Guide. Everything changed after “Bel Canto” sold more than a million copies and won the PEN/Faulkner Award, of course, but the author’s affinity — and talent — for first-person magazine assignments did not.
The new anthology collects 22 pieces (none from the bridal years, thankfully), including essays from The Atlantic Monthly and Granta, travelogues from Gourmet and Outside, two convocation speeches, and her fiery introduction to “The Best American Short Stories 2006.” The variety of subjects (the L.A. police department; elderly Southern nuns; academic censorship) occasionally gives the book a certain off-kilter wobble. “Happy Marriage,” however, holds together when Patchett returns to a few core subjects: loyalty in the face of adversity, the lessons of aging and, above all else, her intense personal calling to become a writer.
The luminous 42-page essay “The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life” should guarantee this collection a place on every aspiring author’s bookshelf, wedged between Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird” and John Gardner’s “On Becoming a Novelist.” The advice to writers can be contradictory, but Patchett errs on the side of sensible counsel, offering tips on everything from navigating workshops to building the discipline to defeat blockage or boredom.
In one of the collection’s funnier asides, Patchett imagines a group of highly paid HarperCollins consultants pitching ideas for getting coverage of a literary novelist on page A1 of The New York Times. One suggests the author commit a murder. Another floats hijacking a school bus. Nobody stumbles upon the news item that really did land Patchett on the Gray Lady’s front page in 2011: her launch of an independent bookstore in Nashville. “The Bookstore Strikes Back” unravels the chain of events that led Patchett to team up with a former Random House rep and open Parnassus Books in Nashville. The business has made Patchett an unlikely spokesperson for indie booksellers, she says, giving a face to the seemingly unwinnable battle against Amazon’s retail empire.
It’s easy to visualize a similar crew of publishing poobahs tasked with choosing a title for this anthology. “The Getaway Car” may be the most unforgettable essay, but that title when it was released as a Kindle Single on Amazon. (The empire strikes again!) Another standout piece details the author’s hilarious and weirdly transformative experience living in a Winnebago. Sadly, “My Road to Hell Was Paved” sounds more like Chelsea Handler territory than the work of a Guggenheim Fellow.
“This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage” comes from an audiobook essay for Audible explaining her fraught decision to exchange vows with her longtime on-again-off-again boyfriend. The name suggests a dewy-eyed primer on matrimonial bliss, but the piece is really a contemplation on romantic hesitation and the intransigence that comes with getting older. As a title for the anthology, it’s flatly misleading. Romantic themes inform only a few of the selections included, sharing almost equal time with remembrances of the author’s dog and grandmother and the bumpy business of selling books.
Even when love does take the spotlight, Patchett’s essential subject is most often divorce. She disarms the thorny topic with jaw-dropping exactness in “The Sacrament of Divorce,” a treatise that should be required reading for all newlyweds.
Like a bright-eyed character in one of her novels, the Ann Patchett readers get to know via this mishmash of magazine memoirs and newspaper clippings is relentlessly upbeat and clever in ways that’s never taxing. The cast of supporting “characters” sparkles and frequently astounds. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to hear that Patchett learned the craft of fiction by studying under the likes of Allan Gurganus, Grace Paley and Russell Banks, or that her first short story ran in the Paris Review.
As ill-fitting as the title may be, “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage” ultimately wins over even the skeptics thanks to its cogent narrative of a charmed and charming life.
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