Paste-Pot Portraits of America

...Perhaps, like Vidal, he has been too fortunate throughout the years for his own good, or perhaps he was simply so taken with Lippmann that he never found the time to ponder H. L. Mencken...

...Admittedly, those lOblocksofthe Upper West Side are among the seediest along Broadway's lengthy diagonal...

...Even in the area where he is strongest, literature, he manages to misspell the names of James Dickey and Karl Shapiro...

...But Amis would not be alone in finding Reston's notions too chipper...

...In fact, they exhibited every reaction we would consider normal in such a situation, excepting the one Amis says is normal...

...What about Beirut...

...At precisely the moment when the nation's economic supremacy is in question, its cultural hegemony has never been so secure...

...Amis' American friends may well have explained this to him, but he needed theadjective "lawless" to convey the senseof anarchy that is one of his themes...

...Spanning the years from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan, it covers such topics as "The Presidents," "Sports and Politics," "The Press," and "The Communist Powers...

...Amis explains in his Introduction that he has reason to know America...

...gets no better from Amis...

...The first is his persistent lament over our leaders' lack of vision, an intellectual legacy bequeathed to him, it would seem, by his hero, Walter Lippmann...

...There he explains that as an essayist, "Vidal sounds like the only grown-up in America," because he is "incorrigibly antiAmerican...

...The streets will yet be paved with gold because the clouds are lined with silver...

...Actually, since his father is a famous author, Amis may have done exactly that...

...From Buffon to Sartre, authors have looked across the Atlantic and gotten it wrong...

...Begin with a small item, his comment about traveling up Broadway to visit Diana Trilling at Columbia University and passing through "the lawless Nineties...

...novelists...

...Writers may be able to remain at home and prosper, but visual artists must come to the United States for an extended stay, and dancers, architects and musicians should at least visit for a while...

...Amis, 10 paces, please, turn and fire...

...Basically, Washington will interest those who wish to discern Reston's recurrent preoccupations...

...These days it takes a powerful and atavistic will to snobbery to title a book on the U. S. The Moronic Inferno...

...By the time a reader reaches the column near the end of the book entitled "The New Pessimism: Is It Justified...

...If, in his later years, Reston's temperateness has broadened a bit into portentousness, his overall career, with its decades of solid journalistic achievement, is one that would do any of us proud...

...Reston's famous report on his experience with acupuncture in Peking, following an appendix operation, is here, as is the column that told the world what Henry Kissinger really thought of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's stewardship at the United Nations during the Ford Administration...

...In the late 1940s, Mary McCarthy composed a rather quixotic essay in which she attempted to demonstrate that Americans were spiritual and visionary by nature...

...New York," he wittily continues, "whereevensupermarkets have their 'policies.'" I hope his English readers understand what the man is being witty about, because no New Yorker will be able to figure it out...

...Pass over his statement about New Yorkers' faces looking "as thin as credit cards...

...The rest of the U.S...

...Of Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter during the 1980 Presidential race he writes: "It is as if they can only just stop themselves from yelling out...

...Itis impossible for them both to be right, though they can each be wrong...

...Finish instead with his silly generalization about "New York being the most politicized city on earth...

...One reads his New York Times column for its steadiness, its Center-Left moderation and its general common sense, as well as for the perspective of a person who gets in vited to all of the capital's parties...

...He really gives the game away, though, in the piece entitled "Mr...

...Amis ranges from Steven Spielberg to AIDS to the new evangelical movement, with a heavy emphasis on the major U.S...

...Someone with Amis' taste for prefabricated generalizations might reply that only an English snot would take anti-Americanism as a sign of maturity...

...on assignment...

...At roughly the time Amis was writing this in Atlanta, a girl was killed on a roof across the street from my apartment building (sorry, flatblock...

...If he had to trim a little to use it, most of his audience in Great Britain would never know the difference...

...Both are cut-and-paste jobs, put together from the ephemera of daily, weekly and monthly journalism...

...They contain more than their share of drunks, panhandlers and criminals, yet Dodge City they are not, as any resident of the neighborhood will quickly tell you...

...Amis obviously has never ridden a city subway and gazed upon the wondrous variety of humanity to be seen in a single car...

...Yet despite themselves, the two collections compel reflection, particularly in tandem...

...The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans," she said...

...It is a European's compilation of clichés about violence, excess, gross mindlessness, and unrelieved money grubbing...

...he will know the answer before he starts, for he has already encountered enough sentiments like the following: "It is impossible to go across the country without being impressed by the fundamental decency and fairmindedness of the American people...

...Reading Amis, with his accountant's obsession for finding the bottom Une, one understands why she undertook the job...

...For while they share essentially the same general concern—the character of contemporary America and of its people—they take sharply differing views...

...Chicago...

...I feel fractionally American myself," he tells us...

...The parts, unfortunately, do not add up to a sufficient whole...

...Cleverness is not his strong suit, and that is putting things mildly for a writer whose idea of a good lineis, "George Bush is no bush leaguer...

...The promise of America shines forever in his eyes...

...He lived in Princeton for a year as a boy and later spent another year in the U.S...

...His complaints are not without foundation—Americans complain in much the same manner among themselves—but it is apparent that during the time he spent here he saw only what he wanted to see, not necessarily what was in front of his nose...

...Amis is in this tradition, and he may have gotten it more wrong than most...

...What the pieces are not is fair...

...The America he knows, however, is one he was prepared to know before he ever emerged from the family library and looked west...

...His occasional observations about New York City are examples of his selective vision...

...hate blacks!' or 'Who is Anwar Sadat?'" When he is not being overly hard on the country he is being overly easy on himself as a satirist, aiming shafts at targets like Hugh Hefner and Palm Beach that not even a blind and one-armed archer could miss...

...Berlin...

...Move on now to a remark that appears in his article on the Atlanta killings of a few years back: "Conversation about murder in America is as stoical and routine as talk about the weather...

...Fruit dealers and Chinese restaurants are open till all hours, and single women can be seen grocery shopping when the rest of us are home watching Johnny Carson or Ted Koppel...

...At their best, his essays are intelligent, funny, wellcrafted, literate, and above all clever in a needling sort of way—exactly what we might expect from a young writer who is a rising light on the British literary scene...

...A New Yorker will tell you about some lurid atrocity in his own flatblock with no more animation than if he were complaining about the rent...

...The second is his unquenchable optimism about the United States and its citizens...

...Jerusalem...

...Two in particular stand out...

...Oh, no doubt I should have worked harder," he languorously purrs, "made the book more representative, more systematic, et cetera...

...Reston, Mr...

...Over there they do this kind ofthing far better than we, almost as if they train for brilliance and fluency from the cradle...

...16.95) and James Reston's Washington (Macmillan, 272 pp., $17.95...

...There is no et cetera about it...

...Missing is the sense that events always have the potential to go tragically, irredeemably wrong, an edge of despair indicating a writer's cheerfulness has been earned...

...Vidal: Unpatriotic Gore...

...Washington is his second collection of columns, the first having appeared in 1967, and it is clearly meant to provide a fair sample of his interests and range...

...Amis reminds us of how Norman Mailer once summed up Gore Vidal's shortcomings as a novelist: "Vidal," he declared, "lacks the wound.' That comment can serve for Reston as well...

...Unlike Amis, James Reston, the grand old man of the Washington press corps, would never shave reality for the sake of a bon mot...

...His wifeis American, as are many of his friends...

...For weeks thereafter, people were frightened, upset and angry...

...American popular culture, at its best and its worst, has conquered the globe—although a person would never grasp its vitality and its impact from the pieces on Presley, Spielberg and Brian De Palma that are Amis' nod in its direction...

...Had the pieces assembled not been dignified with the semi-permanence of a hard cover, they would readily have joined the zillions of other words expended on Elvis Presley's vulgarities and Richard Nixon's deviousness and Gloria Steinem's good looks and Ronald Reagan's magic in the oblivion of yesterday's papers, without the world being any the poorer or less wise...

...One is black, theotherrosy...

...Two cases in point are Martin Amis' The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (Viking, 208 pp...