[In the following review of Sacred Cows … and Other Edibles, McDermott criticizes Giovanni's monotony and lack of wit.]

On February 19th William Morrow and Company will publish what it defines as a collection of essays by Nikki Giovanni, but this designation seems a bit inaccurate. The term "essay" suggests an attempt to order and shape material to a particular topic or collection of closely related topics. Sacred Cows … and Other Edibles is almost exclusively an exercise of glib incoherence. What is recommended by her publisher as her irreverence, her shameless-ness, is nothing more than her audacity in attempting to chat about everything and nothing, almost simultaneously. And yet it is not discursive. To call her work discursive is to suggest that at some point it is on track. There are no tracks—no destination, merely large unmapped areas of speculative discourse. But hers is perhaps a studied, or at least affected, incoherence, and for those who are admirers of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, this refusal to get to the point or stick with the subject might be to your taste. Consider her range in this entire paragraph from "In Sympathy With Another Motherless Child (One View of the Profession of Writing)":

I really don't know what to say about myself. I like music, there is something very special about capping my headphones and drowning in a vision of sound. Someone once asked me if I played an instrument and I replied, "My stereo." It's not surprising that man's first musical instrument was a drum; the image of the heart had to be manifest. The African people made use of the ability of the drum to both inform and incite; for over two hundred years of the American experience drumming was outlawed. A people, though, are rarely stopped in their legitimate desire for either knowledge or pleasure. Whether the Eighteenth Amendment would outlaw alcohol or the Miss America Pageant would desire the clothing of their Black Venus, a people, through individual risk or simply aesthetic innocence, will bring word of a new day.

This style reflects an interesting prose experiment, much the way Molly's soliloquy represents the direct reflections of Molly as she waits for Bloom and approaches the gates of la-la-land. But can you imagine the entire Ulysses transcribed from the interior walls of Molly's slipping consciousness? Imagine, then the monotony of the above Giovanni style for 163 pages.

But Giovanni's collection is also lauded by the publisher as a witty book. Is it?

Recently, a friend of mine, through no lack of sensitivity, on a rainy day in Florida, pulled into a handicapped parking place. Well, the parking space wasn't handicapped, it was simply so designated.

The sacred cow at stake here will be, of course, handicapped privileges. This, in one of her more pointed discussions after a momentary lapse, will reach the witty barb:

But hey. We were discussing designated handicapped parking. At the risk of sounding a bit cold—if they can drive, they can take their chances like the rest of us. Or I'm going to ask James Meredith to initiate a march demanding designated COLORED parking spots. Then, of course, the militant gays will demand designated gay spots,….

Has the initial joke crawled too far? Is this wit, seething with delicious sarcasm? What ever it is, it is a sort of formula wit that she employs again and again:

I am totally shocked by the Cincinnati father who raped his five-month-old baby while his wife was out shopping. Guess that will teach his wife to ask him to babysit.

But ultimately, it is wit without content. And her serious prose stance is, if not pedestrian, sometimes confused as in this opening passage from "An Answer to Some Questions on How I Write":

It's always a bit intimidating to try to tell how I write since I, like most writers, I think, am not at all sure that I do what I do in the way that I think I do it. In other words, (italics are mine) I was always told not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Is there any sort of mirror relationship between the first passage and the second that follows upon the qualifier "In other words"? Perhaps this is unfair to ask that her words say literally what she would like to say—which in this case is "Besides." But is there any significance or content to justify this paragraph or the following confessional insight:

… I do pick my nose when I'm afraid. It's gotten so bad, in fact, that now I know that I'm afraid because I find myself picking my nose.

Perhaps my standards for the genre designation "collection of essays" is too high. There are reputable critics who maintain that Tristram Shandy is not a novel. Be that as it may, Tristram Shandy's existence is insured by its brilliance. Sacred Cows … and Other Edibles has no such insurance policy.