Customer Reviews

Be Sweet: A Conditional Love Story

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I was lucky enough to stumble across Roy Blount reading from this book in a Vermont bookstore. I bought it on the spot, telling him that it was the first one of his books that I had paid full price for. He thought this was pretty fun, the store employee sitting next to him didn't. This book is worth its full price.

Be Sweet in no way sets out to "make fun of the mother-son relationship". I suppose because Blount is such an irreverent goof-ball on the radio and in print, it seems fair to have that preconception. However, Blount has always let us know that some things are sacred and after you get a short way into this book you realize that family is one of them. He desperately does not want to cast aspersions on his own mother's character, but he has to acknowledge that she did drive him to distraction throughout his life.

There were several points in this book were Blount seems to be going off on a tangent. To be honest I began to wonder if he was just filling the space between the covers. Oh me of little faith! In the last third of the book I was progressively more amazed and impressed as I discovered that his seemingly unconnected threads were actually germane to the resolution of his mid-life psychic wrestling match with himself.

Bill Bryson's recent A Walk In the Woods similarly surprised me. I don't expect journalists to write deeply personal prose. Roy Blount beats Bryson hands down as far as the psychological depths that are plumbed and illuminated. If the presentation of the psychological dimension of things bores you or insults your sense of decorum, then don't read this Roy Blount book. If you want to know what is going on in the head of middle aged white Southern guys of above average emotional honesty, then this is a pretty good place to start.

Roy Blount Jr. writes a rambling account of growing up with his strong yet troubled mother -- a woman who despite an abusive upbringing herself managed to raise a son and a daughter with little help from a good but passive husband to be individuals with a strong sense of themselves. Blount is funny and he makes good points about the defensive nature of humor, the lurking self-loathing beneath the humorist. The only turnoff in this saga is that as a middle-aged man, Blount still is in rebellion against his mother for her guilt trips, so much so that he can't, it seems, "be sweet" to the women in his personal life whom he claims he has loved. Otherwise a good read for anyone intersted in family relationships and 1950s nostalgia.

I was very surprised by this book on a number of levels. I've thought Blount's past works were funny, but also quite well thought out. Blount is never "funny" in the sense that Dave Berry is funny. There is no silliness about Blount; he is firmly grounded in reality.

This work is very serious. It is his attempt to displell his "family curse." He explores his relationships with his parents, sister, and ex-wives. He speculates on the nature of humor and humorists.

I thought the book was brilliant. It's like Blount is willing to talk about things that no one else will because doing so would sound stupid, but it's still what you want to say.

An added bonus is Blount's voice. He is not a particularly elegant reader. But it is hard to imagine any other voice reading this work. I compare it to Jean Shepard, who also has the perfect voice for his own work.

By the end of this book, I knew for certain that it was worth reading although I had many doubts until then. Blount made me laugh and made me marvel at his skill, but he also bored me with his self-loathing and longueurs. The chapter on the troubles of men named after their fathers (juniors) was excruciatingly dull, and forgot to make mention of Hank Williams Junior, one of the most grandiose sufferers from this syndrome. Worse, Blount junior never really explained what made his mother so maddening. Nevertheless, he tells very well how he finally came to value what she (and his father) gave to him.

Any book by Roy Blount is vital; so is any piece of journalism, from his paen to Krispy Kreme donuts to his classic profile of Joe DiMaggio. This book is a future classic; people will be amazed it wasn't more appreciated at the time. It combines the deeply felt with the deeply funny--the hardest trick in the literary book.

i bought this and looked it a good month or two before reading it. there was something about the way it was set up that i found off-putting. it wasn't a typical memoir or autobiography but blount's not a typical writer. once i began, though, i couldn't stop. it's funny, of course, but tender, biting and revealing all at once. we love our mothers, we may hate our mothers but we will never forget our mothers. a better book on a related subject is rick bragg's "All Over But the Shouting."

If you have never read Roy Blount, Jr., start with Be Sweet:A Conditional Love Story. Then begin to work your way through his many works. If you read Be Sweet, you'll understand the foundation for this man's incredibly deep vein of humor and his unique ability to observe this human race and mine the genuine humor that life creates. He's a classic.

I bought "Be Sweet" because my mother was a "Paty Class" member along with Roy's mother and she listened to Roy's daddy teach and I knew Roy's sister, Susan and i wanted to see if Roy Jr. had ever been able to be as sweet as any of our mothers wanted us all to be. At times Roy rambles down the red clay back roads of his Georgia boyhood and I wonder where we are headed...but I do not questioon my desire to followy. Grab a hold of a strong kudzoo vine and swing out over the arcane waters of the 'be sweet' mother and her "ya-ya" off spring.

Having roared at Roy Blount's humor on the Garrison Keillor show, I really looked forward to reading his book making fun of the mother-son relationship so aptly caught up in the title, "Be Sweet". I was terribly disappointed and found him not only lacking in humor but exhibiting a real dislike for females altogether. It was a book I easily gave away to the second hand shop.

This book is several things. One thing it is NOT is funny. Blount worries that, having attained the age of 55, he is experiencing some sort of humorist's change of life and is no longer capable of evoking guffaws. Well, then, this book is a self-fulfilling prophesy. In the process, we get to squirm through such incessent dissing of his mother that we want to turn our heads in embarrassment; so much what-did-I-do-wrong whining about lost loves that we're inclined to "card" him to see if he's really past 15; and yet more tired and feeble attempts at what, I suppose, is to pass for "Southern humor." If this is the best we're to expect from Blount as he flounders through middle age, he ought to confine himself to his periodic appearances with Garrison Keillor, reading jokes sent in by people who know what "funny" really is.