THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Too Rich Remember Denise Rich? The Clinton pardon scandal lady? She was born wealthy, the daughter of a shoe manufacturer. She married wealthier, to financier Marc Rich, who...
...But the American Waspocracy surrendered long ago and is no more...
...There's a full-page ad on page 15...
...This was unfair...
...In these three qualities are to be found the reliable antidotes to snob-bery—and, not coincidentally, the animating forces behind this wise and funny book...
...Its thick, lavish prose seemed too ambitious, just as its soaked atmosphere of a hard life on Vermont land seemed too cynical, inviting comparison to other dirt-road bestsellers like Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain...
...vastly superior, indeed, to what you'll find among those snooty Europeans, who Andrew Ferguson is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The story opens with his relationship with the young prostitute he's won in a poker game...
...Pardon Me" was to be the title—get it?—and celebrity ghost Laura Morton (Jerry Springer, etc...
...The problem Krause raises can be put simply: A healthy liberal regime needs spirited citizens, yet the very quality that animates public-spiritedness, honor, is inimical to democrats...
...All snobbery is, in some sense, ill bred—in the sense that everything is ill bred that does not seem to have behind it kindness, generosity, and a good heart...
...Unfortunately, his second novel does not strengthen his case...
...David Skinner Snobbery in America Joseph Epstein on his fellow citizens...
...Its disappearance has led to many complications, as Epstein notes in his new book, Snobbery: The American Version...
...Alas, one wishes it were just a little bit less entertaining...
...He is excellent on downward mobility, one of those complications unleashed when Baby Boomers decided, out of reverse snobbery, to reject the conventions of the upper-middle class...
...Steve Lenzner Lost Nation by Jeffrey Lent (Atlantic Monthly, 270 pp., $25...
...Or so said Kathleen Hughes, publisher of something called Capital Books, when early last summer that oufit announced it would publish Rich's "inspirational" autobiography...
...For all its virtues in diagnosing the problem of honor today, Krause's remedy—to follow the examples of those who led the fight for racial and sexual equality in the 20th century—is not without difficulty...
...This is as it should be, given an object so enduring as snobbery, so impervious to scolding or uplift...
...He's pretty quotable himself...
...He gives us a tour of club snobbery and snobbery in dress, job snobbery and snobbery in politics, with many stops in between...
...We're hoping for a bestseller," Hughes explained...
...But never mind that...
...Turns out, in fact, that Pardon Me: The Denise Rich Story, as unceremoniously indicated by the block letter stamp Capital Books has applied across its advertising copy, has been outright "CANCELLED...
...Yes, well...
...First and foremost, however, Lost Nation is the story of the condemnation of the pub's owner, Micajah Blood Bolles, known simply as "Blood...
...Krause might have looked to other figures—Winston Churchill, for example—who better struggled to reconcile honor and liberalism...
...They, we, are everywhere...
...Sharon Krause has written one of those rare works of academic political theory that demand a wide audience...
...In a chapter on food snobbery he notes that in high-end grocery stores today, "there are more varieties of balsamic vinegar than American states, more virgin olive oils than actual virgins...
...The American version of snobbery, in other words, is something new— and much better, I would add, than any other snobbery in the world...
...The latest Capital Books catalogue still prominently features Rich's vanity project...
...Lent's subject is the American soul, Christian and savage at the same time, noble but also tragic, on the brink of civilization but prone to monstrousness even in the presence of a governing body...
...What the Federalist Papers identify as "the ruling passion of the noblest minds"—the love of fame—we regard with suspicion and hostility...
...Lost Nation is a frontier tale about an ungoverned bit of land in what is now Vermont and a community as it struggles to rise above what political philosophy might call a state of nature...
...Raising the question of the status of honor in liberal democratic societies, it treats its subject with intelligence, seriousness, and a graceful style that can only be the envy of her fellow academics...
...She lives in a 28-room Fifth Avenue apartment, attended by a staff of 20, including her "personal healer...
...Democracy, it turns out, is fertile soil for envy, insecurity, and one-upmanship, the conditions necessary for the flourishing of snobs...
...Marc has been pardoned, after all, and there's been a divorce, and, as a consequence, Denise is now among the wealthiest of the wealthy...
...was to have been the actual writer...
...What the demise of the Waspocracy did for snobbery," he writes, "was to unanchor it, setting it afloat if not aloft, to alight on objects other than those connected exclusively with social class...
...It really was an inspirational story, after all...
...Lent had enough punch to be considered in all but the most serious class...
...Quoting John Adams's over-quoted letter to Abigail ("I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy...
...Jeffrey Lent's first novel, In the Fall, was both hailed and castigated for its tragic tale of race and violence...
...Krause traces this tension in a series of chapters on such figures as Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Lincoln...
...Books in Brief Liberalism with Honor by Sharon R. Krause (Harvard University Press, 288 pp., $29.95...
...But it turns out the initial press run will be a wee bit smaller than 150,000 copies...
...He admits to being a snob himself from time to time, though he struggles against it...
...On a single page he can quote William Dean Howells, Lady Diana Cooper, Jean Cocteau, and Ludwig Wittgenstein without, amazingly, clogging the pipe of his argument or, still more amazingly, betraying the slightest suggestion of showing off...
...She married wealthier, to financier Marc Rich, who during their time together earned more than a billion dollars—and mug-shot status on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list...
...Will Susan Sontag ever be able to leave home again, or at least appear on The Charlie Rose Show, after she reads pages 148-50...
...There is much violence in Lost Nation, but also much suspense of the Old-Western sort, with guns and horses and whatnot...
...See...
...It is Blood's fate to live in guilt for a sin against his own family—a crime so profound that no penance is really possible...
...More than hoping: Earlier this year, the Capital Books catalogue promised an October 2002 first printing of 150,000 copies...
...and so on), he brings it up to date for an immigrant grandfather: "I must run a dry-cleaning shop so that my sons can go to medical and law school, in order that their sons may study sociology and communications, so that their children can run vintage clothing stores, act in avant-garde theater, and work in coffee shops...
...No subject," he writes, "apart possibly from podiatry, is impermeable to snobbery," which allows Epstein—the celebrated essayist who needs no introduction to readers of The Weekly Standard, where he is that rarest of journalistic creatures, a contributing editor who actually contributes—to roam freely over the wide expanse of American culture...
...Denise Rich, in short, "has been through a lot and she has a message for women...
...His eye is keen but not unkind, and his erudition, which runs very deep, is casually deployed...
...All well and good and dark and morally interesting, until the light of goodness begins to illuminate the hellish recesses of Blood's heart, which may not be as bad as one thought...
...But his general tone is amiable, detached, and amused...
...Blood's trials, however, are resolved with a stunning glibness that threatens the more-interesting final twist...
...Not unforgiven so much as unforgivable, Blood is, miserably, more than capable of recognizing the profound depths of his own transgressions...
...For in their victories, those movements advanced the principle of equality that undermines the honor they employed...
...As one realization after another slowly dawns on the reader, the most important one comes out fatuous and cute...
...Most of us hold to an egalitarian civic creed, but we're still human: We like looking down on the next guy as much as the next guy...
...This was easier to pull off when we had an upper class clearly definable by ancestry and religion— the Waspocracy, in Joseph Epstein's coinage—that other Americans could look down on for being so snobbish...
...And at many a turn, the story is entertaining, a quality one wouldn't have expected after the dour poetry of In the Fall...
...BY ANDREW FERGUSON Snobbery: The American Version by Joseph Epstein (Houghton Mifflin, 274 pp., $25) Snobbery is a touchy subject for Americans...
...Lent delivers a compelling portrait of this coarse society and its coarse pleasures, building his tale around the day-to-day life of a one-whore pub...
...For democrats cherish equality, and honor is a principle of distinction...
...It seems there's been a slight change of plans...
...think they're all so great—much richer in its variety, and much more slippery in its marvelous and unending exfoliations...
...Reverse snobbery has been a specialty here, where (small-d) democrats often scorned members of (big-S) Society even more intensely than vice versa...
...sometimes, though, he's not kind either, particularly when it comes to personages who have built their careers much more on self-promotion and snob appeal than talent...
...I say that Epstein is not unkind...
...Indeed, the execution of the book's most important scene casts in doubt the seriousness of the story...
Vol. 7 • August 2002 • No. 45
