PASSIONLESS:

The Adjuster: a review of American Studies by Louis Menand (David Bromwich, New Republic)

Louis Menand has been publishing reviews and essays for about twenty years. He writes on most things a non-specialist could write on: novels, movies, television, magazines, politics, education, manners, celebrity culture. His academic training was in literature, but academically most of what he does would now be classified as cultural history; his book on the American pragmatists, The Metaphysical Club, was an ambitious and rewarding contribution to that genre. He brings to his pieces a large share of general information, prose decorum, and an accent of overwhelming sobriety, sometimes nicely, sometimes oddly varied by facetious asides. For those of us who have been following him on and off, the puzzle has been to decide what exactly he cares about.

On arriving at the end of one of Menand's pieces, you commonly think: how ably done. The subject has been closed. You are less excited than you were before. The absence of extreme opinions in Menand's work is reassuring, but it is also, when the articles are presented in bulk, rather baffling. A critic, like a reader or a spectator, is allowed to go over the top in wonder and delight, or, if he is a good hater, to make us laugh out loud. Even daily reviewers often exhibit a ruling passion or a driving enthusiasm. It has not been clear what Menand's is.

I wonder if Mr. Bromwich didn't miss the entire point of Mr. Menand's earlier book, The Metaphysical Club, which celebrated the American Pragmatists of the late 19th Century. That book was structured around, and Mr. Menand seemed to be endorsing, the pragmatists desire to drain life of controversy and strongly held ideas. It seems unsurprising that Mr. Menand would in turn make his own criticism rather placid too. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 9, 2003 7:52 PM