America in Three Contexts
GEWEN, BARRY
Writers & Writing AMERICA N THREE CONTEXTS BY BARRY GEWEN Writers who concern themselves with what Reader's Digest calls "life in these United States" must sometimes envy political commentators....
...Nor does he lack the bitchiness that seems a prerequisite for the close observation of manners and style...
...But he has not, so far, succeeded in establishing a perspective that brings his taste and values fully to bear on his material...
...Earlier critics of American popular culture like Dwight Mac-donald will discern many familiar strains here: the tyranny of the Philistine majority, the vacuity of television, the decline of authentic values, the importance of fame, the submersion of the individual into the mob...
...A down-and-outer taking potshots at the pretensions of the avant-garde art world, she wrote with a topsyturvy hauteur that led thousands who laughed at her barbs to conclude W.C...
...Her targets were phoniness, fatuity and anything cute...
...With the deftness of a good jazz musician, Trow discovers new ways to present these old ideas, playing clever variations on standard themes...
...Assumed that either he was a dentist on the side or that it didn't fit in the bathroom...
...The contemp-tuousness on which so much of her humor depends here seems uncalled-for, unearned, her scornfulness merely the arrogance of the lumpen-sophisticate...
...Everyone knows the rules, participants are easily recognized, and there is a culminating main event...
...There is no doubt where Ellen Goodman has planted her feet...
...Her "Diary of a New York Apartment Hunter" will bring a guffaw of sympathy to any reader who has ever engaged in the most discouraging activity short of looking for a job: "Was shown a co-op apartment of recently deceased actor...
...Fields was alive and well and living in the Big Apple...
...Ertegun "lacked the inflexible center," says Trow...
...And writing about it is similar to wading out into the ocean...
...Where the Moral Majority is working one side of the street, she can be found working the other side-with wit and good humor...
...Since the technique itself is the joke, these pieces are about as amusing as a Levi-Strauss anthropological transformation...
...Second assumption proved correct...
...This enables her to bring a fresh angle to so weary a topic as inflation...
...But irony by itself, no matter how well expressed, is ultimately unsatisfying fare, and often a reader is left feeling, as with the dissection of People magazine, why bother...
...Before long, one finds oneself skimming, winnowing out the good lines from this chaff...
...It allows her to make surprising connections, as between diet fads and people's feeling that they have lost control of their lives...
...Fran Lebowitz had a surprise bestseller a few seasons back in Metropolitan Life, a collection of humorous pieces about the esthetic existence in New York City as practiced by a Bohemian curmudgeon who, lacking money, dispensed poison-dart wisecracks instead...
...Covering Washington, like reporting on the Pittsburgh Steelers, is largely a matter of knowing the players and the power plays...
...George W.S...
...setting, where Trow finds nothing solid or substantial, only a mass market operating on the empty principles of aeon game...
...Success, however, does not become her...
...and he can be savagely funny...
...Even the language-peppered with such phrases as "the political arena" and "throwing your hat into the ring"-suggests athletic competition...
...He is intelligent and subtle, with an eye for the power relationships underlying social conventions...
...The first, which provides the book with its title, is an ambitious and impressionistic survey of the cultural detritus strewn across the American landscape in the form of TV, movies, magazines and fashion .The second, "Within That Context, One Style: Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse (Ahmet Ertegun)," narrows in on a single pop music entrepreneur who is taken as representative of our current sorry state...
...The second essay is the more intriguing of the two...
...Goodman is a committed feminist and an unrepentant liberal, but no knee-jerk...
...Anyone considering buying the book, though, would be better advised to spend a half hour or so reading it at a bookstore...
...you'd think that there not being a shower in there would have left plenty of room for a sink...
...Trow's stance is out of sync with his subject...
...To progressive parents she suggests: "Never allow your child to call you by your first name...
...He hasn't known you long enough...
...Apparently Social Studies is on its way to being as much of a success as Metropolitan Life...
...his perspective is that of the ironic patrician bemusedly remarking on "what fools these mortals be"-as compared to Lebowitz' earthier "would you mind removing your piano from my foot...
...Worse, indeed disastrously, large portions of Social Studies aren't clever at all...
...If he ever does, watch out...
...Trow shares Fran Lebowitz' hauteur, but he looks down rather than up...
...Most of your effort is spent getting your footing, developing a stance...
...She is rightly praised for her sanity and common sense, virtues she has constructed out of such fine personal qualities as a willingness to hear all sides, a lawyer-like skill at making distinctions, an acceptance of contradictions and unresolved dilemmas, an emotional honesty that permits her to confess her true reactions to events even when they are unwanted reactions, an ability to see things whole...
...By now so seasoned, Ididn'tbat an eye at the sink in the master bedroom...
...In At Large (Summit Books, 245 pp., $12.95), the latest collection of her nationally syndicated, Pulitzer Prize-winning columns, she shows once again that she is sparklingly alert to the public side of private life, the nexus between society and the individual...
...At the heart of his achievement there was no answer stated or question posed but, rather, only this: the rhythms of infatuation smartly expressed...
...Ostensibly expanding on the ideas of the first, it follows the activities of Ahmet Ertegun, millionaire founder of Atlantic Records...
...Couldn't understand why, though...
...The wisecracks are few and easy to spot...
...Lebowitz' new collection, Social Studies (Random House, 147 pp., $9.95), is more of the same-though not the same, for irascibility wears about as well as sandpaper...
...instructions on how to marry a poor person instead of a millionaire...
...The rest is scarcely suitable for the remainder shelves...
...More important, as a producer during the late '40s and early '50s, he madea lasting contribution, sensitively analyzed by Trow, to American music...
...As Within the Context of No Context amply demonstrates, Trow is undeniably a writer...
...An unabashed advocate of children, dogs and green, leafy things, she is solidly middle-class-in the best sense of that much battered phrase: the socially concerned ethically responsible bourgeoise to Trow's patrician and Lebowitz' Bohemian...
...Fundamentally, she is a pragmatist, but her pragmatism has no relation whatever to the currently fashionable kind that is only a cloak for cynicism and self-serving manipulation...
...It rests, rather, on that most homely of domestic virtues: straightforward good will...
...Most rewardingly, it involves her in some of the most contentious issues of the day: abortion, censorship, teenage sex, rape, children's rights...
...Trow reports on Ertegun's business lunches, business trips and business deals, and the piece ends in a splash of jet-set parties, attended by assorted Warhols, Halstons, Vreelands, and Jaggers...
...To his credit, Trow does not conceal his admiration for Ertegun ("I thought Ahmet was a great man in spite of himself), yet since reverence has a way of undercutting irony, the essay has a distinct wobble...
...Not so with social commentary...
...The "no context" of the opening essay is the U .S...
...Although she writes primarily about domestic matters (her own catalogue of subjects lists "values, relationships, women's issues, families, change"), she saves herself from the smugness that usually afflicts writers of her kind by shaping her views with a keen political edge...
...In this country, where social structures are not clearly defined and rigid, people have a hard time simply locating society...
...Trow's Within the Context of No Context (Little, Brown, 230 pp., $ 12.95) consists of two pieces, somewhat uncomfortably linked, that originally appeared as long articles in the New Yorker...
...The haughtiness that was genuinely funny when she was a struggling survivor in New York's lower depths has become, now that she is a bestselling author, a pose, a vehicle for gags, so that even where she is being amusing, the falseness of the tone makes the humor sound strained...
...Too often, Lebowitz relies for laughs on easy reversals and substitutions-her greediest cases an echo of the New York Times' neediest cases...
...American politics is as highly structured as a sports match...
...Lebowitz can still be very funny...
...If this were all there was to Ertegun, he would be worth about a paragraph's attention but, it turns out, this son of a Turkish ambassador possesses an aristocrat's grace unique in the hustle-bustle world he inhabits...
...Three new books demonstrate that how well a writer succeeds in finding a convincing foothold amid the shifting tides of American life will in large measure determine how valuable his or her observations are...
...Frequently, his comments are striking, his way of putting things exquisite...
...an autobiography of the comic as garment manufacturer: "I started with a humor pushcart on Delancey Street...
...If it was warm and cuddly, it gave her a chill...
...He has a hard, sinuous, absurdist sensibility...
...At her best, she also can write about everyday annoyances better than almost anyone else...
Vol. 64 • November 1981 • No. 20
