Pop-cult dissection

>> Sarah Vowell's Take the Cannoli is a treat of tasty essays

by JULIET WATERS

I once went out with a guy who was addicted to Jaws. He'd seen it easily 100 times. Whenever things were going bad he would retreat from the world with his VCR and watch it again. On our second date he sat me down and said, "All you will ever need to know about me you can find out by watching this movie." Needless to say, the relationship did not last long.

I'm not sure if movie addiction is a bona fide syndrome, but the possibility occurred to me when I read the title essay in Sarah Vowell's collection Take the Cannoli (Stories From the New World). During her last year as a liberal arts major at Montana State, Vowell was addicted to The Godfather. Unlike my ex, this was not something she was proud of.

"I thought that if anyone knew how much time I was spending with the Corleones, they would think it was some desperate cry for help. My concerned boyfriend would eject the tape from the VCR with a flourish and flush it down the toilet like so much cocaine. Then my parents would ship me off to some treatment centre where I'd be put in group therapy with a bunch of Trekkies."

The Godfather I understand better than Jaws. When I was 10, it was the second book I read after Anne of Green Gables. Sicily is very different from PEI, but essentially the two books shared the same message: even wild spirits need codes for living and we all need some kind of family.

The Godfather, as Vowell explains, is filled with rules for living: "A man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man. Don't bow down to big shots. It's good when people owe you. This drug business is dangerous. Is vengeance going to bring your son back to you or my boy to me?" And finally, the ultimate mantra: "Never tell anybody outside the family what you're thinking again."

It took Vowell a couple of years to figure out what this neurotic obsession was all about. There's a dark side to family structure. "The other side of moral certainty is staying at home and keeping your mouth shut. Why not tell people outside the family what you're thinking? As I would later find out, it's a living."

This pretty much sums up the ethos of the successful modern essayists. When it comes to making a living at non-fiction, there is no loyalty to family anymore. Millions of dollars are to be made from your family's deepest secrets. If you just want to make a living, like Vowell, you have to settle for your family's bizarre eccentricities: your father's gun craze, your mother's apocalyptic fundamentalism, your twin sister's crush on John Wayne.

And then, of course, there are your own weird quirks. To Vowell's credit, she is far more open about her own neuroses than her family's. And her obsessions are funny enough to make a good living as one of America's best young non-fiction writers. A former columnist for San Francisco Weekly, she's known best for her radio essays on NPR International and her columns in Salon.

A self-described "meaning junkie," she sees the symbolism in everything. At Disneyworld two weeks after the Columbine massacre, she and friend David Rakoff witness a family feeding a turkey leg to some birds. Feeding birds to the birds, as Rakoff observes, is "species on species abuse." A comment Vowell turns into a thoughtful, funny, smart essay on violence in American culture.

Her intense passion for music yields a great essay on how Frank Sinatra was the first punk. Her friendship with Nick Hornby (author of High Fidelity) becomes "Thanks for the Memorex," a meditation on mixed tapes. Her nightmare weekend at Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy Camp becomes an acidic dismemberment of '70s rock.

Like the title, these essays are treats, a few of them are even worth re-reading. And for those closeted movie addicts, it's a good self-help book.

Take the Cannoli (Stories From the New World), by Sarah Vowell, Simon & Shuster, hc, 219pp, $33.50