Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on Our Civil Religion.

LIFESTYLE OF THE RICH AND ANXIOUS

Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on Our Civil Religion

UNDER Lewis H. Lapham's tolerant stewardship, Harper's Magazine has wandered all over the ideological map, publishing everybody from Tom Wolfe and George Gilder to Christopher Hitchens and Edward Said. Still, one thing has remained constant: Lapham's witty assaults, in his monthly "Notebook" column, on the foibles and follies of what he calls the "equestrian class." People with money get under Lewis Lapham's skin. In Money and Class in America, he returns the favor.

The basic premise of Money and Class in America, shorn of the verbal fireworks in which Lapham delights, is that people with money, especially Americans, are boring and stupid and influential--and scared stiff:

Believing that they can buy the future

and make time stand still, the faithful

fall victim to a nameless and stupefying 

dread. They possess all the goods and

services that a rich society can afford,

but because they expect from money

more than it can supply they feel themselves

deprived. . . . They worry about

the provenance of their shoes and the

politics of their dinner invitations, about

unknown microbes loose in the rose garden

and the humiliation of having to

live at a minor address.

On this promising framework, Lapham strings a long and enormously amusing succession of ironic tales of the lifestyles of the rich and anxious. We meet George Amory, who finds it impossible to make ends meet on $250,000 a year. ("I live like an animal. I eat tuna fish out of cans and hope that when the phone rings it isn't somebody dunning me for a bill.") We meet a well-heeled woman whose new Upper East Side residence sports an icebox within arm's reach of the bathtub. ("`She needs the icebox to chill the cologne,' the lawyer said. `She said that there's nothing so unpleasant as to step out of a bath on a warm day and have to wear tepid cologne.'") We learn the delicate nuances that distinguish Old Money from New Money. ("Not being inhibited by what it was taught in school, the new money can send a limousine across town at 3 A.M. for a chicken sandwich, two bottles of champagne, and a complete set of Marcel Proust.")

The flair with which Lapham recounts these anecdotes suggests that he may have missed his calling. A volume of droll stories told by a cold-eyed, Maughamesque narrator who lets the reader draw his own conclusions would have been just right. But Lapham is an essayist, not a storyteller, and he insists on full disclosure of his portentous message. Every pointed social detail is imbedded in a thick skein of political generalizations that ultimately fail to ring true. Why did Gary Hart's campaign go sour? "What bothered people was his lack of business acumen." Why did Ronald Reagan spend so much on the military? "Variations on the theme of dingy humiliation . . . echo through the mournful statements of Caspar Weinberger, the former Secretary of Defense, who wished to enjoy the privilege of conducting simultaneous wars, some nuclear and others merely conventional, on five continents and seven oceans."

Despite the obvious sincerity of Lapham's outrage, the fact is that it doesn't rub shoulders very comfortably with his urbane and infectious amusement at the tales he tells. He is a moralist without a convincing code of morals, and when he finally turns over his ethical card at the end of Money and Class in America, the anticlimax is thunderous:

If the heat and light imprisoned in the

brilliance of a diamond could be released

and transformed into bread, roads, or

schools, the worth of the diamond

would warm the lives of thousands of

people. So also with the human possibility

imprisoned in many other sterile

monuments dedicated to the majesty of

wealth--in cruise missiles and the frantic

speculation on Wall Street; in the Trump

Tower and Roone Arledge's dramaturgy.

The suspicion eventually arises that Lapham has either missed or, more likely, is talking around the point. Readers of the February issue of Vanity Fair were treated to a full-page photo of Lapham sitting on an expensive-looking piece of furniture. The caption identified him as "a graduate of Hotchkiss and Yale, the scion of old wealth--his great-grandfather founded Texaco--" and described "his spacious, bare-walled apartment in the East Sixties." Unfortunately, Lapham plays it pretty close to the vest when talking about his own relationship to the equestrian class. Had he been more forthcoming, his book might have been more convincing.

As for that address, readers of Money and Class in America who hail from less rarefied climes are likely to sniff suspiciously at Lapham's claim that if you've seen one millionaire, you've seen `em all. That may be true on the Upper East Side. It may even be true on the Upper West Side. But the richest man in America, lest we forget, is a fellow from Arkansas who started a homely chain of small-town dry-goods stores called Wal-Mart. He still drives a pickup truck. If he and his ilk, not to mention their part of the country, show up at all in this book, I must have missed it.

"Perhaps I have been corrupted by my upbringing in the precincts of wealth," Lewis Lapham suggests amiably, "or possibly I have lived too long in the city of New York." Fortunately, that isn't hard for the reader of Money and Class in America to fix. Just substitute the words "New York" and "the Upper East Side" for "America" and "the United States" throughout. Then you'll be a lot more likely to appreciate the considerable virtues of this very funny book.