In The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell offers her readers a unique time capsule into the political and literary stylings of the early 2000s. Full of a kind of arch cynicism, this book’s consideration of contemporary America post the ill-fated military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq reflect some of those anxieties of the Bush era that have faded in the popular cultural consciousness. Seeking to trace the roots of American exceptionalism to Puritan colonization, Vowell’s book answers the question “what would it look like if a university press produced Family Guy?”
As “humor” is the prevailing theme of this season of the High Plains Public Radio listener book club, it’s perhaps unsurprising to see Vowell’s attempts to trace the roots of the discontent of the early aughts to the Puritan colonizers of the seventeenth century chocked full of winks and nods to the camera. While not entirely my cup of tea, HPPR listeners might find themselves reveling in the nostalgia Vowell’s tonality immediately evokes. Much like a heavy synthesizer producing an inherently 80s vibe, Vowell’s humor and parenthetical sarcasm is oddly comforting as a temporal marker. Much like a Rick Reilly or Bill Simmons sports column, Vowell’s thirty-year late Godfather references are so of a moment that I find myself fighting the impulse to form analogies around important cultural artifacts from 2007 to illustrate my point. Ah, I see how we fall into this trap!
There are moments in this book that I have a hard time laughing through, though. Early in the book, Vowell claims that “the Cherokee, even when I was young, still prided themselves on being the most civilized of all–the most Christian, the best behaved.” She goes on to state that she has “always been a little uneasy about what seems like a striving for whiteness. It’s just ever so craven.” For a book written to dispel and/or complicate some notions about the Puritans colonizers, I was relatively astounded by such an inaccurate, ungenerous, ahistorical generalization of the Cherokee people and their tribal histories. Historical humor works if it can capture the complexities of the human experiences that make up our many historical narrativizations. When it fails to do so, and when it erases historical nuances and marginalized voices in favor of a tonal stylistic choice, I too find it to be “ever so craven.”
Again, I think that listeners will find much to like in Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates. This is an NPR affiliate station after all, and as I found myself returning to the question of “who is this for?” at several points during this read, I imagine this broadcast might reach one or two cynically humorous American history nerds with a tendency toward style over substance.