The aching secularist has found storied higher ground in The Wordy Shipmates, where she applies her anti-cool cool to the tale of seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay Colony and the settlers of the Great Migration. Like any good popular treatment, Vowell poses herself as a frontierswoman in a caricature. “By and large the Puritans are seen as laughable, written off as stupid, but in fact they’re intellectuals,” Vowell writes. The “typical Puritan spoilsport cartoon” is wrong because it makes Puritans seem priggish when in fact they were just bookish. And they weren’t just bookish, they were nice: “The New England Puritans are not remembered for their sweetness, and yet there was much sweetness in them.” This defensiveness has geek roots. Talking about The Wordy Shipmates, Vowell says her turn to a renewed Puritan was the result of a reader’s respect: “I felt like the Plymouth pilgrims and Salem Witch trial loonies are sort of the only ones who get any attention in American culture, and I’m most interested in the Boston ones sandwiched in the middle, who I feel are more interesting because of their writing.”
Like most popularizers, Vowell’s return to the past has a present imperative. Through a stadium tour of John Winthrop, Roger Williams, and Anne Hutchinson, Vowell believes she might find a way to think about the contemporary American disposition toward intellectualism and empire building. To be sure, as she explains, the current United States “bears a closer family resemblance to the devil-may-care merchants of New Amsterdam than it does to Boston’s communitarian English majors.” And there is much to be disavowed in theocratic Massachusetts Bay where “there’s no agreeing to disagree…there is only agreeing to agree.” Yet like Perry Miller before her, Vowell believes that having respect for the Puritans “is not the same thing as believing in them.”
And so she respects them through an immensely amiable ramble. Popularization’s premise is a usable past easily accessed. In this, Vowell is a champion, redacting theological debates and Pequot War skirmishes to swift effect. As with most front-table nonfiction, The Wordy Shipmates is a book quickly read, leaving in its wake the self-satisfied sheen of a New Yorker profile read during a long cherry blossom bath. The reader feels like she has steamed a little for her learning, but without too much aerobic loss. Criticism of such a subject is a little like whining about your vacation in the South of France. If you didn’t like it, why did you go? Reading such purposefully popular volumes is a voluntary luxury, and one which makes hipster denigration less hip than it is (more often than not) humorless.