In Search of the Holy Mother of Jobs

After her 'Afoot in the Fields.....', this anthology seems to reach as high, but just barely scpape the summits acheived in the former. This testifies to how great 'Afoot in the Fields' is, though. Because 'In Search Of.....' is plenty entertaining, plenty funny, and unique in its way. It contains the same Pandora's box full of neurotic spirituality, clownish characters who are actually quite scary and sometimes irritating (memorably so), situations that make the reader feel embarassed for the 'voice' of the story, outright unexpected belly laughs that jump off the page at you, feminine wisdom galore, peculiarly American struggles, dreams and goals beaten to heck, mind-flinging drugs, social commentary by default, and both fashionable and unfashionable modes of poverty and simplicity, AND EVEN SOME KINKY INTIMACY, too. Being an author, I absolutely love this woman's work. And 'In Search of' was long-awaited, and well worth it. Oh, and one more thing: Ms. Littledog is the QUEEN of 'readable stream-of-consciousness.' No one does it better!

Pat Littledog is an almost unknown Texas and national treasure: one of the last of the hippies of the Great Cultural Revolution as it played out for Southwest women in the 60s. A generation later, she is a writer who still has the soul and guts to talk about who she -- and we -- really are. Littledog writes about her life, which is the life of the 70's-singled divorced woman with a passle of kids from her pre-liberation life, a congenital inability to buckle down to 9 to 5 and suburbia, a constant monkey-on-the-back: the need to make a living for herself and her brood -- and yet, an invincible lust to enjoy sex, smoke dope, and write, write, write. Somehow she manages all of it in the Age of Reagan, the Age of Bush, during the downsizing, the war on drugs, and all the other beleaguerments of our times in the late 20th century Southwest. Her stories are set, variously, in Austin, El Paso, San Antonio...in the basement of a peeling used bookstore, in law offices, at a fly-by-night fireworks stand: all the places where she attaches herself, like a desperate female barnacle, to eke out a living and a life. There is nothing pretty in these stories but there is incredible beauty. Littledog is never sentimental as she describes her struggles. And that makes her work both hilarious and tear-jerking. She can take the funkiest, most depressing scenes and infuse them with a weird, vibrating glow that makes the reader feel like you're on a word-acid trip over the subject of, say, a bunch of half-disciplined little kids trying to help their mom sell enough Chinese rockets by July 4 that the family can get its beat-up old van fixed. For this particular reader (who happens to be an inveterate atheist), the scene somehow took on the marvel of a passage from the Kabbalah. Others are just as fine. You never know whether to laugh, cry, or read more. So you do all three. And when you finish this book, go out and get Afoot in a Field of Dreams, an equally wonderful collection of Littledog's stories.