In What now?, Ann Patchett offers wisdom for the journey
by Margaret Renkl
It's hard to imagine a hokier looking book than Ann Patchett's What now? (HarperCollins, 112 pp., $14.95), a gift book for graduates or, apparently, anyone at a metaphorical crossroads. From the cover image, where a young man stands at a hub of garden paths leading outward in eight different directions, to its multitude of puzzle pieces and mazes and gnarled interstate junctions and arrows pointing in indeterminate directions and footprints making circles in the sand, to its text divisions marked not by asterisks but by rows of question marks, the book's visuals are about as subtle as a two-by-four across the cheek, or a high school version of Hair, circa 1973. Here's what the design says: "This is a book for confused people."
It's a real shame the book looks so dumb, for Ann Patchett's actual words here are not just smart but also wise, and the truth she offers is so far out of fashion today that it's nothing less than revelatory. "It turns out that most positions in life, even the big ones, aren't really so much about leadership," writes Patchett. "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." For the purposes of this book, achievement isn't necessarily about making it to the top of the class, the top of the heap, the top of the corporate ladder.
Sure, the Dalai Lama has been elucidating this point for a while now, but it's not a lesson your average college graduate today has ever heard in the lifelong process of building a résumé that likely began with flashcards in the crib and Baby Mozart.
In fact, What now? is an expanded version of Patchett's 2006 commencement address at Sarah Lawrence College, her own alma mater. Unsurprisingly, it is full of the kind of newly minted aphorism one might expect from a celebrated novelist: "Receiving an education is a little bit like a garden snake swallowing a chicken egg: It's in you but it takes a while to digest," for example, or "[W]riting a novel and living a life are very much the same thing. The secret is finding the balance between going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way."
But even more than a collection of make-your-own-way-in-the-world advice, the book is also a funny and moving narrative, the story of Patchett's own winding and obstacle-strewn path from waitress at T.G.I. Friday's to best-selling (and prize-winning) Nashville author of Bel Canto and Truth & Beauty, among others. The speech that became What now? was itself a second try. (Patchett showed her first version to novelist Allan Gurganus, who had been her professor at Sarah Lawrence. His response: "Sorry. No." Like any dutiful student, she began again.) The wisdom she offers here—about the value of silence and idleness, of finding a teacher in everyone you meet, of the many sadnesses that can be stemmed simply by listening, and, above all, of what can be gained from failure and uncertainty—makes this far more than a gift book for confused graduates. Slim as it is, it might even be an antidote to our confused times.
Ann Patchett will read from and discuss What now? noon Dec. 18 at the Main Library.
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