The critic’s eye, clear and cool

Last year, Louis Menand won a Pulitzer for his history of American pragmatism, “The Metaphysical Club.” “The Metaphysical Club” was an attempt -- a largely successful attempt -- to join company with America’s greatest cultural journalist, the Edmund Wilson of “To the Finland Station” and “Patriotic Gore.” For a book of such unembarrassed intellectual ambition, “The Metaphysical Club” was a huge hit; and if it fell short of Wilson’s standard, it’s only because no one could breathe the same lucid fire into the scrupulously undogmatic pragmatism that Wilson once poured into his studies of socialism and the literature of the Civil War.

Now Menand has published “American Studies,” a collection of essays written over the last decade, covering everything from America’s founding modernist, William James, to America’s favorite smut magnate, Larry Flynt. For all the success of its award-winning predecessor, “American Studies” should not be mistaken for an afterthought: It represents the heart of Menand’s work (he is essentially an essayist) and demonstrates his status as his generation’s premier critical talent. It is easily among the finest collections of essays by an American critic since Lionel Trilling’s “The Liberal Imagination.”

“American Studies” charts the trajectory of Menand’s own career, from a well-behaved academic to a somewhat cheeky magazine eminence. In an industry where the average lead paragraph often seems styled to wake the dead, Menand writes with a deceptive lack of pizzazz; but his is a deep talent. He unites the spirit of roving amateurism with a patient, scholarly demeanor; he is very clever, without once looking up to see if you’re laughing; and he has that rare ability to say something utterly fresh and unexpected, and yet to have it strike the reader as true on contact. The first four or so essays, superb as they are, still have something of a demure, quarterly feel to them. But by the heart of the collection, once Menand has started to write about media stardom, about Norman Mailer and William Shawn’s New Yorker, he has hit a groove; and suddenly the noiseless, patient writer has you in his thrall.

One after the other, Menand slowly takes apart various enthusiasms that have flattered the educated middle classes in decades past -- Norman Mailer (the 1950s), the counterculture (the 1960s), Pauline Kael and Christopher Lasch (the 1970s). The effect, I warn you, is not always salutary. For reading Menand is a little like watching Tiger Woods play golf: The skill is incomparable, but the suaveness and efficiency are perpetually on the verge of driving you mad. You keep thinking, if only something of the maudit or slovenly would invade the prose, if only for the space of a dependent clause.

The key to such rhetorical control is the excess of others; and many of the writers Menand selects for disassembly seem mostly guilty of being anti-Menands. None more so than poor Kael, whom Menand clearly loves, but whom he finally cannot abide: “The writing is all in the same key, and strictly molto con brio,” he tells us. “There is no modulation of tone or (which would be more welcome) of thought. She just keeps slugging away.” She is prone to “garrulousness and compositional dishevelment.” Where others have been garrulous and disheveled, there Menand brings a signature coolness. The 1960s, he tells us, presumably laying out his own qualifications, is a subject that “could use the attention of some people who really don’t care.”

Menand’s favorite technique is what we might call “liberal domestication”: He likes to show how the seemingly radical breakthrough was in retrospect mostly a media or middle-class fad. Thus the counterculture “had all the attributes of a typical mass culture episode: it was a lifestyle that could be practiced on weekends; it came into fashion when the media discovered it and went out of fashion when the media lost interest; and it was, from the moment it penetrated the middle class, thoroughly commercialized.” Or Mailer’s worldview, advertised as outre, is in its essence “comfortably inside the realm of liberal middle-class culture. Everyone within that culture salutes the principles of moral freedom and intellectual honesty, and loathes the idea (without necessarily foregoing the convenience) of plastic.”

The morbid teen picks up “The Bhagavad Gita” or “Catch-22” and is made new. Menand picks a book up, and leafs through it like it was a 10-year-old copy of Vanity Fair, left for dead on a sun porch. Can you believe how seriously we once greeted “Batman Returns”? For what fascinates Menand most of all is anachronism. Thus Mailer is “a man -- in 2002, possibly the last man -- of the 1950s.” Hunter S. Thompson “in short, is practically the only person in America still living circa 1972.” The 1960s “stripped of its idealism and sexiness, lingered on” into the doleful 1970s. By the Vietnam era, The New Yorker was still practicing a “politics of whimsy ... a politics nobody in 1968 was likely to be paying attention to.”

Why does Menand return so frequently to unplanned obsolescence? The clue comes in those rare moments of rhetorical overreach on Menand’s own part. Running up the score on a reliably silly opponent -- media studies academics -- his insouciance gets the better of him: Scholars, Menand tells us, sometimes write “as though they had forgotten that no one has ever been forced to watch a television show.” But of course they have, and by the legion: the public school students who have been force-fed Channel One by the Edison School’s founder, Chris Whittle. “All rock stars want to make money,” Menand insists in the essay on Rolling Stone magazine, “for the same reasons everyone else in a liberal society wants to make money: more toys and more autonomy.”

This is hardly news -- when it comes to Mick Jagger and lucre, the filthier the better, presumably -- and as a general rule, tingly neo-con maxims delivered more of a charge back in 1990. Nonetheless, the suggestion runs subtly throughout “American Studies”: We are all equally implicated in America’s commercialism. “Everyone participates in this system,” as Menand elegantly conveys it, “and partakes of its benefits (individual economic opportunity and national economic expansion) and puts up with its drawbacks (cheap goods, an often banal and sometimes exploitative popular culture, financial uncertainty).”

And so we are led to ask the very Menandian question: What does it say about us, and the 1990s, that the decade’s star critic was so poised, so balanced, so meticulously acid-free? Menand’s name for his approach is “historical criticism,” and what he is guarding against is, he tells us, “the element of wishful thinking that infects all critical writing.” Modern American life is designed around commercialism and progress; and thus it tends endlessly and remorselessly towards change. “[T]he impulse to hold on to the past is very strong,” he admits in the introduction to “American Studies.” “A lot of energy and imagination are consumed trying to fit old systems into new settings, though the pegs keep getting squarer and the holes keep getting rounder.”

Given America’s tendency to destroy the past, we must temper our enthusiasms with a kind of wise insouciance; and Menand admits as much by ending his preface with the proposition “Today is the only day we have.” This is Menand to a T -- is he intoning sententiously, or is he winking at me? Anyhow, it is a bit of literary hocus-pocus. You can rework it in either direction, after all, and still sound rather fancy: We are borne ceaselessly back into the past; the shadows of futurity cast themselves upon the present; tomorrow never dies. “American Studies” is a magnificent achievement, and it is no exaggeration to say every page is an example of critical lucidity, humor and calm. No one writing in a generalist spirit even touches Menand. But his twin emphasis, on tweaking liberal aspirations and on the inexorable American “today,” comes at a small, if often hidden, cost.

We liberals, in the NPR-and-Volvo sense, are pulled forward by our ignorance and an insatiable gullibility. But sometimes we’re pulled forward by our liberalism: what Trilling meant when he argued that even a vague sentiment can sometimes help bring to fruition a world less brutal, less ugly and less vulgar than the one we know today. Is this an important omission from the book? Or am I just being morbid?