Sloth: The Seven Deadly Sins (Seven Deadly Sins)

Rating:
Summary: Sloth: The Silliest of Sins
Review: The New York Public Library and Oxford University Press conspired to develop a lecture series in which some of the most interesting modern minds ponder the most ancient human foibles: the Seven Deadly Sins. The lectures were given at the New York Public Library and the authors were permitted (encouraged?) to rework them for publication. Wasserstein's SLOTH and Robert Thurman's ANGER are the latest titles to join the series (ENVY and GLUTTONY were published in 2003; LUST and GREED in 2004; PRIDE is promised for this spring and hopefully will come before the fall).

Although I've bought all of the available titles, I chose to read SLOTH first (always having had a soft spot for this sin). It is not surprising that Wasserstein, an accomplished playwright, chose to adopt a persona to convey her message-that of a sloth guru, the author of a anti-self-help book entitled "Sloth: And How to Get It." The guru is so slothful s/he hasn't gotten around to forming a clear or specific sexual identity (At college, "I played sports on both men's and women's teams, and I had also danced the young male and female lead in the New York City Ballet's Nutcracker"; p. 19) Anyone who has tried all the new diet books, attended a 12-step group, guiltily read PEOPLE at the supermarket check-out line, or gotten caught up in church/synagogue, school, or office politics, will enjoy the many jabs Wasserstein delivers to institutions and champions advocating perfectability. SLOTH has the potential to become a modern satirical classic like C.S. Lewis's THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS or Ambrose Bierce's THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY. However, unlike Lewis's great work, the jokes are mostly superficial, univalent, and very repetitive. It is, in the end, a one-joke book, and you could certainly accuse Wasserstein of taking enough trope to hang herself.

My disappointment (why I only gave this very funny book only four stars), is that Wasserstein only occassionally reveals a serious concern with the nature and history of her chosen "sin." When I got to chapter three ("The Concise History of Sloth"), I thought that Wasserstein at last was going to start taking her subject seriously. And she does--for four pages (pp. 24 to 28), where she gives a very brief description of how "accedia" (originally understood as "sadness") was usurped in the seventeenth century by "sloth" on the Church's list of the Big Seven Sins. But wisdom can be found among the book's many flippancies. For instance, in her chapter on "Uberslothdom" she asserts, "True sloths are not revolutionaries...Sloths are the lazy guardians at the gate of the status quo" (p. 104). Hmmm.