American Studies
By Louis Menand
Farrar Straus & Giroux
HC, 320 pgs. US$25/C$39.95
ISBN: 0-3741-0434-4

Exploring America's cultural history

By Steven Martinovich
web posted December 9, 2002

It's a testament to Louis Menand's skill as a writer that even if
you disagree with him or don't care for the topic he's exploring,
he still manages to be compelling enough that a reader will want
to finish one of his essays to see where they are being taken.
American Studies, a collection of Menand's essays from The
New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, casts a wide
net over America's cultural history, exploring everything from
T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism to the connection between Hustler
publisher Larry Flynt and evangelist Jerry Falwell. While some of
the essays fail to fulfill their promise, most are undeniably
compelling.

American Studies opens with essays on a pair of figures, William
James and Oliver Wendell Holmes, familiar to readers of
Menand's Pulitzer Prize winning The Metaphysical Club. Thanks
to Menand, James and Holmes may now be better known to
Americans as proponents of the failed philosophy of pragmatism
than for their work in the fields of psychology and the law.
Rather than tread the same ground covered in The Metaphysical
Club, Menand instead explores James' famous "epileptic patient"
episode and whether it was in fact an autobiographical statement
and Holmes' "bettabilitarianism" and how it influenced his
approach to the law.

From there he moves into Eliot's association with anti-Semitism,
ones that Menand concludes were "all too worldly" and a profile
of Native Son author Richard Wright and how his cultural
experiences formed his worldview and influenced his writing.
While the first four essays are interesting enough, American
Studies doesn't begin to gain real traction until his profile of
James B. Conant, best known for being head of the atom bomb
program during the Second World War. Menand mostly ignores
that legacy in favor of Conant's work in the field of post-
secondary education which includes the SAT and a meritocratic
approach to admissions, both under increasing fire today.

Similarly, Menand uses his look at William Paley, former chief of
CBS, to examine the early days of television and how a web of
government regulation and industry action combined to give
Americans the three channel universe they lived with until the
early 1980s. Although it's popular to refer to a Golden Age of
Television as if it ever existed, Menand's look at Paley makes it
fairly clear that popular tastes dictated what appeared in those
early days – something Paley was comfortable with given his
self-proclaimed denial he was a highbrow – creating a medium
"of utterly respectable mindlessness."

Equally interesting is his eviscerating look at Normal Mailer, a
man Menand describes as possibly the last man "of the 1950s."
As Mailer's later work has born out, he is a man desperately out
of his own time and has been so since the 1960s. The most
passionate essay may be his paean to the late New Yorker
movie critic Pauline Kael who, not unlike Mailer, also suffered a
brilliant early creative period only seemingly lapse into a shadow
of herself near the end of her career.

If there is a star essay it may very well be "Lust in Action: Jerry
Falwell and Larry Flynt". Describing the polar opposites as two
men "working opposite sides of the same street," Menand
illustrates how Flynt and his exceptionally lowbrow approach to
pornography and Falwell's socially conservative political agenda
needed each other in order define themselves. Ex-members of
the Moral Majority – not to mention fans of Hustler – may not
appreciate or even believe in the symbiotic relationship between
the two men and their causes but it is interesting to note that their
rise and relative decline has mirrored each other.

Where American Studies works less well is in Menand's 1998
New Yorker profile of then U.S. Vice President Al Gore, a not
too subtle attempt at humanizing the wooden future presidential
candidate at a time when the contents of the Starr Report were
hammering the Clinton administration. The collection of essays
does recover some its steam with a look at Maya Lin, best
known for designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but
unfortunately Menand's profile is curiously flat given the role Lin
has played in changing what a memorial represents to society.
 
Despite those missteps, American Studies is an example of the
remarkable skill that Louis Menand brings to his role as an
examiner and writer of America's cultural history. Menand
deserves his reputation for being able to illuminate the basic ideas
that have come together to form the dominate trends seen in both
America's recent past and today. American Studies is a true
treasure from a master in the field of cultural history.

Steven Martinovich is a freelance writer in Sudbury, Ontario.

Enter Stage Right -- http://www.enterstageright.com