Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
Noonan, Peggy
BOOK REVIEWS A t the end of her previous book (What I Saw at the Revolution), Peggy Noonan was touting the new Bush administration, which she had helped bring to power by writing the president's...
...Here's all you do...
...God's not aiding her to find the right house in Washington helps her decide to stay in New York...
...N oonan likes to portray herself as rescuing people with supportive bits of wisdom, and there are traces here of the same self-aggrandizement that put off a number of those who reviewed her previous book...
...She is moving when she writes about why she likes the boy to be around when she polishes the furniture...
...But Noonan wasn't about to join a team whose members hated one another...
...Answer: "Yes" if you have a color monitor, "No" if you have a monochrome screen...
...We're both even godparents to nephews named Sean...
...They connected it to: My mother cares for the house, my mother cleans and cares for the house, for the family, for me...
...something just tells me they're going to save our country...
...Follow the directions that appear on the screen...
...Bush represented, she assured us, "an affirmation of ambition: He was right to want it, and he's going to be good...
...Box 2029 Friday Harbor, WA 98250 66 The American Spectator July 1994...
...I cannot dislike Peggy Noonan...
...Here it "comes with an escape hatch and is surrounded by a knowing question: Where will he show up next...
...This is a nice fantasy, but it leaves out the very real feelings of inferiority that motivated each group to assimilate...
...I was hoping you could bridge the gap and make the difference," said Teeter's desperate aide...
...I keep wondering if...
...That's all I can do, help him dodge a bullet.' " Some months before this, she'd written Teeter a memo (more prophetic than the last chapters of her first book), in which she worried that Bush, like Churchill in 1945, was going to lose the election after winning the war...
...Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness is about the past few years that Noonan has spent on "Pause," out of politics for the most part, raising her son and seeking a renewal of her Catholic faith...
...Set your computer software to: No Parity, 8 Bits, 1 Stop (N-8-1), 2400 Baud, VT 100 or ANSI...
...T he structural conceits of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are aggressively informal—what Peggy thought at the hair salon, what occurred to Peggy as she channel-surfed—and the prose style is something like Joan Didion by way of Ronald Reagan: "I keep wondering about who we are these days, all of us...
...to do so would be self-loathing...
...I think the prevailing feeling was, everyone's human...
...The most refreshing part of her book is its revulsion from "boomer narcissism," the dreary fixation that has doomed us, for years to come, to the musings of Anna Quindlen and Frank LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS Peggy Noonan Random House / 255 pages / $23 reviewed by THOMAS MALLON tives in the city, where all of one's best friends are liberal, learn to practice in argument: "One of my functions when I'm surrounded by those whose politics are generally of the left—at a seminar or a dinner party—is like that of a Negro at a 1950s liberal cocktail party: I am an opportunity to show how broad-minded they are...
...Online...
...I can't write a great speech and I can't turn this into a triumph, but I can push the president into the car and help him get away...
...She goes to Bible-study class now, and is making an effort to return to a church whose mystery (and Latin Mass) she misses...
...After the free trial, new subscribers may purchase a minimum 5-hour block for $100 to continue using THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR–Online...
...That was "the decade when America went crazy, the decade when, as John Updike said, the sixties had finally percolated down to everybody...
...That should do it...
...I complain about it too, but I mean Def American Records, Time Warner, Death Row/Interscope . . . ." She would be more persuasive if she herself didn't talk about "Washington assholes" and hang out with Joan Rivers...
...By the time of the New Hampshire primary, she was resisting invitations to join the campaign and work her rhetorical magic...
...She wants to be closer to her son, to her roots—she intends to spend more time in Massapequa, Buttafuocos or no Buttafuocos—and to God...
...T his new book is such a miscel- lany of observations that it's hard to come to any coherent opinion of it...
...someone who recognizes that liberalism has led New York to the point where the bowel habits of pets are more strictly policed than those of humans, but who, for all that, can still say, and mean it: "I love my neighborhood...
...It tells me that things at the White House are, at least this evening, a little too relaxed.',' Noonan's story is probably no more meaningful than the grammar in which she tells it, but the middle portion of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness does have the distinction ofbeing the first campaign memoir by someone who refused to join a campaign...
...Noonan prefers the company of Guadalcanal veterans to contemporary parents who natter on about their effortful child-rearing, but on occasion she lapses into making the squishy sounds of present-day feeling ("No one looks like what they are...
...rr hanks to a revolution in on-line 1 services, you can get THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR in electronic form...
...She is a true enthusiast of democracy...
...The way this thing has been hyped and the shape it's in, this is a bullet coming straight at the heart of the president...
...Noonan's best big-picture observations of the culture include one about how there are no "rubes" left in America: "We have become a nation of insiders...
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...In her parents' world: -' The American Spectator July 1994 65 The Irish knew they were better than the Italians and the Italians knew they were better than the Irish and we all knew we were better than the Jews and they knew they were better than us...
...an Irish-American reciter of the Baltimore Catechism...
...She reprints a 1991 New Year's Eve speech she gave to the twelve-step chautauqua on the prescribed subject of "Sailing Uncharted Seas...
...0 shining Enterprise Zone upon a hill...
...On this large subject she is persuasive—"Myfriends complain about the decade of greed, and mean Michael Milken...
...someone whose early movie-going was supervised by the Legion of Decency...
...BOOK REVIEWS A t the end of her previous book (What I Saw at the Revolution), Peggy Noonan was touting the new Bush administration, which she had helped bring to power by writing the president's convention acceptance speech...
...proud of the "beautiful living Benetton ad" that her young son and his friends look like together...
...Her addiction to the tube seems curious, aware as she is of its contribution to the "coarsening" of America...
...Once connected, you may hit your ENTER key once or twice to initiate a handshake between your computer and THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR –Online...
...Some sentences are pure speechwriting ("There is in this place more sin than hell could hold, and enough goodness to light up the world"), which doesn't travel so well to the printed page...
...Perhaps she should write diaries instead of instantaneous memoirs, and let such things as the president's tears ferment for a decent interval...
...Once again she's guided by her parents' generation: They worked so hard in the house...
...One wants simply to agree with a few things here, object to a number of others there...
...LOOKOUT POINT P.O...
...It's an odd one: does it mean "iniquity," you wonder for a moment, before remembering that, no, it means nearness, proximity...
...Her book has the earnest amiability that conservaThomas Mallon's new novel, Henry and Clara, will be published in August by Ticknor & Fields...
...She is sometimes wrong about the place (the subway is, in fact, one of the few aspects of life markedly better than it was ten years 64 The American Spectator July 1994 Rich and other eager representatives of their (and my) over-analyzed and under-challenged generation...
...The hapless Bush campaign was probably better off without her, since she would no doubt have been as keen on seeing the experience yield a memoir as a victory...
...Noonan also has grasped, if only second-hand, a truth that continues to elude most purveyors of boilerplate thumb-sucking, namely, that it was the 1970s that really changed the country...
...Propinquity is what Peggy Noonan is seeking these days...
...We all know everything now...
...enthusiastic about the new immigrants to New York while nostalgic for the ethnic harmonies of the past...
...How could he not succeed, surrounded as he was by lieutenants such as Richard Darman, a man who had "never touched failure," and whose work at the Office of Management and Budget was contributing "daily to what will no doubt be said when they review his thirty years—brilliant, and important...
...She seems to have in mind the "soldiers laid off in the downsizing of the armed forces," who are going to come home and police the new tax-free ghettoes...
...She likes to see herself as a Katharine Hepburn heroine, giving better than she gets to the gruff, good-guy Tracys she works with, but like many women her age she was probably more influenced by Mary Tyler Moore: our gal Peg, throwing her hat in the air, greeting the day with open arms, never letting pessimism trump perkiness for more than a moment...
...Even Darman could have a comeback here...
...No matter where you're from or what you do you've got the facts...
...She is mon semblable, ma soeur: a child of postwar Long Island (in her case, Massapequa, before she saw it shed its GI Bill-dignity and become "Buttafuoco-land...
...It's easier to clearly show love to the preverbal"), and she does have, one is alarmed to note, a safe-conduct pass to that orgy gf boomer-driven sharing known as Renaissance Weekend...
...And I think their children unconsciously absorbed some connection between Mother waxes the table, her hand going back and forth back and forth along the brown wood with Lemon Pledge, and the old soft cloth that smelled like chemicals...
...The press will speculate on my reasons and I can't tell them my reasons, so they'll make them up...
...She does try seriously to ponder the whole notion of values—that word Bush idiotically exclaimed in '92, throwing it out upon the airwaves without so much as an adjective to keep it company—and she writes poignantly of having to spend as much energy protecting her child from the culture as introducing him to it...
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...Our sophistication may be useless, but it's sophistication of a kind...
...As Noonan, who has spent the last several years in New York, might now put it: who knew...
...She seems like a nice woman, and one wishes her the best...
...Everyone knew they were superior, so everyone got along...
...leaves out the way enforced time in Army barracks helped them to tolerate one another...
...She paid attention to the bad portents she'd been glimpsing—how the White House staff forgot to get Bush his tea, how it was slow getting a car the president had ordered to return her to the airport: "I've never seen a president ask for a car and it took a half hour to get there...
...When Noonan turns her eyes to the future—near the close of the book one finds an extended Utopian fantasy of what real tax incentives for inner-city business might lead to—she can sound like a supply-sider on nitrous oxide...
...We read Spy and Vanity Fair, know Irving didn't like to be called Swifty, know which film opened big last weekend and which network won the year, know the difference between a rating and a share...
...ago), but when she's right, she's interestingly so: in New York, unlike Washington, failure is never definitive...
...Direct your modem to dial (216) 831-1522...
...The whole dilemma is overthought, and oversold to the reader, and it's too much bound up with her quest for personal happiness to be of much political interest...
...She is stuck on the city in the brassy, sentimental way that New Yorkers are terrified of losing (when she got back here, "It was all so vivid, and vital"), lest the place's harsher realities, like those street criminals she compares to fascists, be seen in something like their true proportion...
...She laments the demise of private political diaries (Dick Cheney won't keepone that will always be subject to somebody's subpoena), but she has no apparent respect for anyone's privacy, Less than three years after President Bush cried to her, over dinner, about the troubles of his son, Neil, she serves up his tears to the American public...
...The first thing you will be asked, once connected, is whether to "Display ANSI Graphics: Yes or No...
...Actually, that used to be a saying in America: Everyone's human...
...Propinquity" is a favorite word of Noonan's...
...Young black men will save our country...
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...a genuine believer in America...
...This is a good story, and best left to herself to tell...
...A few weeks after that she would be trying to save George Bush from having to deliver a badly drafted State of the Union address: "I sat in [Robert] Teeter's office at the Bush-Quayle campaign, and read...
...Blow it in Mediatown and you can still find a place in Publishingville, fail to make it in Societytown and you can repair to Museumville to ponder your next move...
...Probably the best thing she could do for her prose (lively and charming though it can be) is turn off the television, which she admits to keeping on while she works...
...She is certain that Clinton will be a one-term president, and she spends a number of pages handicapping the '96 Republican field, but her principal ambition for the here and now is to become preoccupied by one great light instead of a thousand points, to take a break from spinning and sound-bites for the more serious business of reading His lips...
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...and leaves out the fact that what finally bonded the Irish and the Italians and the Jews was, alas, a postwar fear of the Puerto Ricans and the blacks...
...If I declare I'm not going in," she agonizes to a friend, in terms more appropriate to a candidate than a speechwriter, "it's news...
Vol. 27 • July 1994 • No. 7
