American Studies

I'm new to Menand. American Studies is my first Menand tome. First impression: this is a guy who is not as interested in his own ideas/habits/tastes/opinions as he is in understanding why he holds those ideas/habits/tastes/opinions. Its quite clear that Menand thinks what he thinks because he is the child of American academics of a particular time and place (the ideological schisms of the fifties and the cultural schisms of the sixties) and as a result he is skeptical of intellectual life, and doubly skeptical of intellectual extremes and writes about intellectual life/idea/habits/tastes/opinions with shrewd suspicion. As I write this Menand is working on a book about the Cold War, and the ideological battles of that decade, and I look forward to that book as he seems ideally suited to write such a book. There are few like Menand: ideology-free cultural historians. Though refreshing, this unique disinterestedness is not likely to win Menand many fans. Unlike Sontag or Kael, he is not a writer who is going to sway you to believe anything, or try anything new (unless pragmatism is something new to you). Rather, he's the kind of writer/essayist/scholar who is interested in preserving the best part of our democratic and cultural traditions: ie hes a reactionary (against the extremes of both the old right and the new left) who champions a pragmatic middle way. In the ideological & cultural wars, he's Switzerland. These are admirable, if not riveting, essays. Menand's strong point is assaying the cultural significance of cultural institutions like Oliver Wendell Holmes, T.S. Eliot, Richard Wright, CBS, William Paley, The New Yorker, Norman Mailer, Pauline Kael, Rolling Stone, Hunter S. Thompson, Larry Flint, Jerry Falwell, & Hustler. His weakness: he almost always has his eye in the rearview mirror (and that mirror is almost always firmly fixed on the overly-trodden 50's & 60's) & rarely on the present, or on the road ahead.

American Studies is a compilation of essays on contemporary American lives by the wonderful essayist and critic Louis Menand. What a treasure this man is! He writes on subjects like William James, Pauline Kael, Al Gore, James Conant, and Norman Mailer with wit, insight, and surprising originality. Menand is the kind of writer people will be reading 100 years from now, and readers then will say, "wow, this guy really nailed it." Give yourself the treat of this wonderful book.

I had only read a couple of the essays in this collection when they first appeared in the NYReview of Books, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. As the amorphous title of the book suggests, its sum is not much greater than its parts, and yet I found most of the parts completely engaging and very rewarding. The pieces on Justice Holmes, James Bryant Conant, Al Gore, Bill Paley, and the New Yorker magazine itself were perhaps the best, although I admit that it's pretty much Bos-Wash stuff and may not appeal to a mass readership. One reviewer here has called the writing "stilted." I could not agree less. Although as of this year a member of the Harvard faculty, he, like his colleague Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (also a contributor to the New Yorker), avoids academic jargon and writes most felicitously and well. I'm not sure about the discipline of "historical studies" but Menand is certainly one of its best practitioners.

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.

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.