American Studies

Rating:
Summary: Bloodless
Review: Collections of essays by intelligent, thoughtful people are always fun, or should be. But this is not the feeling one gets on reading this collection of essays by Louis Menand. This book is a reprint of essays that have appeared in such worthy journals as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and the New Republic. We start with essays on William James and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Then we discuss T.S. Eliot's anti-semitism, Richard Wright and James Conant, as well as the New Yorker, and modern television. We read essays criticizing Pauline Kael and Christopher Lasch, a deflation of Larry Flynt, a look at the mind of Al Gore, and finally a piece on Vietnam War Memorial architect Maya Lin.

Yet compared to works by such other New Yorker and NYRB alumni such as Joan Didion, Renata Adler, and Anthony Lane, this book is a rather bloodless work. People who have read Menand in the past will regret the absence of his deflation of Camille Paglia, or his critical review of "Saving Private Ryan," as well as his dissections of such movies as "Independence Day," and "The Wings of the Dove." But the problem is not simply selection. In his informative essay on Lin he notes her view that one reason that her work is so emotionally effective is that she herself maintained her emotional detachment, and her apolitical views.

This view seems to have infected Menand's prose, with disappointing results. On the one hand Menand's review of Pauline Kael is not as memorable as Adler's ruthless polemic against her. (He writes that her reviews were not really "rereadable." Sometimes, sometimes not. Nor true, in my view, of her reviews of "A Clockwork Orange," or "The Godfather, Part Two.") His essay on television is much more complacent than Mark Crispin Miller. On the other hand his critical review of Christopher Lasch's "The True and Only Heaven," is not as acute as Stephen Holmes, or as informative as Jackson Lears' eulogy. But what is really problematic is something else. "The True and Only Heaven," is a deeply flawed book, but at least Lasch cared deeply about American democracy and its problems. At least Kael had a deep admiration for movies, and a genuine sense of disgust and anger at the way studios betray them. Menand not only does not share the same feelings, he does not really seem to care. There is little sense of intensity and passion, just a sense of superiority over a woman who should care so much about something as unimportant as popular movies.

Consider also the essay on Larry Flynt and Jerry Falwell. This is the sort of essay Bill Clinton would write on the topic if he were not an adulterer. There is criticism of both sides, and like much centrist rhetoric seeks to find an affinity between both "extremes." After all, lower class white male Southerners are both consumers of "Hustler" and evangelical Christians. True, but then so are many other sectors of the American population. And consider his essay on Al Gore. There are some subtle criticisms of Gore's stiffness and sententiousness. But there is no real feeling that a politician seeking to be the most powerful man on earth should show real imagination and vision. Perhaps one should move to the left of the Clinton-Gore consensus, but not too much more. One is reminded of a Feiffer cartoon from the 1960s, in which a "responsible" critic of the Vietnam War carries a sign requesting "A Little Less Bombing."

Isn't there anything he really likes? Menand's book on American pragmatism worked on the idea that pragmatism was a salutary reaction to the dogmatism of abolitionism. Such a view, as Lee Siegel has pointed out, works best if one believes that Americans did too much to free the slaves, and that African-Americans had no claim on their countrymen's conscience after 1876. Consider the way Menand dismisses the idea that Holmes had any kind of coherent politics, or his view that racism is simply an atavism due to dissolve in the course of modernization. "The evil of modern society isn't that it creates racism but that it creates conditions in which people who don't suffer from injustice seem incapable of caring very much about people who do." Read this again carefully. Is there nothing "modern" about racism? Is callousness a recent development? Menand has criticized in the past post-structuralists and Critical Legal Studies, but at least these people were not guilty of that sort of banality. On the plus side, the essay on T.S. Eliot's anti-semitism is quite useful, and includes the fact that Eliot compared the notorious anti-Semite Charles Maurras to Virgil in an article published after Maurras' conviction for collaboration with the Nazis. There are some useful comments about the New Yorker style, and some interesting comments on the development of the technology of television. Also, he likes Laurie Anderson.

Rating:
Summary: Graceful, Not Bloodless
Review: I was lead to this book after coming across Menand's recent essay in the New Yorker, "Bad Comma," which was a delight to read and could very well be a masterpiece of contemporary criticism. I confess the only piece I've read from this collection so far is the one on Pauline Kael, and it didn't strike me as being bloodless. As a matter of fact, I laughed out loud several times while reading it at Barnes & Noble earlier tonight. Menand's prose is graceful, engaging, insightful, and (as already indicated by my laughter) at times quite humorous. I say "at times quite humorous," but his wit, in paragraph after paragraph, is almost always on display. I don't agree with everything he says--for example, I AM drawn to reread Kael's best work, such as her essays on "Bonnie and Clyde" and "A Clockwork Orange"--but disagreeing on this score doesn't make the experience of reading him less enjoyable. Pnotley, in the review titled "Bloodless," asks, "Isn't there anything he [Menand] really likes?" Well, for one, he really likes James Agee's movie reviews for The Nation. Perhaps the finesse with which Menand fleshes out and dissects ideas is what Pnotley finds so bloodless: too much of the surgeon with his scalpel, that sort of thing. I can see that, but I can also see that he helps keep the patient alive and healthy. His criticism is relevant; it reinvigorates the world of letters.

Rating:
Summary: Intelligent essays
Review: Menand hones in on his subjects and nails them dead on. Whether it is T.S. Eliot's antisemitism, the middle-brow nature of the New Yorker, or the brain of Al Gore, Menand has a way of clearing away the clutter and offering lucid, witty assessments. What do Larry Flynt and the founder of the moral majority have in common? Read this book and find out.