Author profiles personalities present, past
By Todd Leopold
CNN
(CNN) -- Louis Menand wanted to like Al Gore. He wanted to get underneath the then-vice president's surface, to engage him in conversation, to get him to shut off the tape recorder in his mind.
But the Gore he got, as indicated in Menand's 1998 profile for The New Yorker, was a man already thinking about his 2000 run for president -- and a dispassionate, if thoughtful, observer of himself and his times.
"He's got everything all figured out," Menand says in a phone interview from New York. "It was hard to get him off track."
The Gore article has now been published in Menand's new book, "American Studies" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a collection of the author's pieces for The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and other publications.
More than four years later, he's still disappointed in Gore.
"When you talk to a politician like that, it's hard to get something new out of him," says Menand, 50. "I do think he's intelligent, and the way he thinks must make it hard for him politically."
But, he says, at the interview session there was a human element missing -- a common criticism of Gore, a man many have found loose and humorous in private but stiff and buttoned-up in public.
"When I met him, I didn't feel a particular warmth toward him," Menand says, with some sadness.
'I've never gotten worse mail'
"American Studies" also includes stories on 19th-century figures William James and Oliver Wendell Holmes (also featured in Menand's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2001 work, "The Metaphysical Club"), authors Richard Wright and Norman Mailer, avant-garde musician Laurie Anderson, and the odd pairing of Jerry Falwell and Larry Flynt.
"They're evil twins of one another," Menand says. Both men, he writes in "American Studies" "put the shame back into sex" and have used the prurience of many people for their own ends: Flynt to sell magazines, Falwell to man the barricades (and raise money) against Flynt's magazines and their ilk.
He also wrote a piece on Rolling Stone magazine for The New Republic that took the one-time countercultural bible -- and the counterculture itself -- to task for taking itself too seriously.
"I've never gotten worse mail," he says, noting that many people thought he was insulting the '60s and one of Rolling Stone's most identifiable writers, Hunter S. Thompson.
On the contrary, Menand says; he thinks Thompson's two "Fear and Loathing" books ("Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72") are "great."
As for the '60s, a line in the article indicates it's the sentimentality attached to the '60s that gets him: "Thompson is the eternally bitter elegist of a moment that never really was ... and that is why he is an ideal writer for a generation that has always felt that it arrived onstage about five minutes after the audience walked out," he writes.
In any event, the criticism doesn't bother Menand. The Rolling Stone article "is my favorite piece [in the book]," he says.
'Treat it as a mystery story'
He also took some hits for his portrait of Pauline Kael, the legendary New Yorker movie critic. Kael is one of his favorite writers, Menand says, but he notes in the article that her tastes and the tastes of mainstream film audiences went their separate ways in the '80s.
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I want to give some insight that you don't get elsewhere.
"I think a lot of her, but the 'Paulettes' weren't happy [with the piece]," he says.
Menand, now a staff writer for The New Yorker, also teaches English and American studies at the City University of New York. Writing always came naturally, he says; the teaching was something else.
"I went to grad school and got my Ph.D. at Columbia, but I don't know why I went," he says. "I guess I felt I would be a terrible writer. I didn't think I'd end up teaching."
His M.O., he says, "when given a piece, is to try to treat it as a mystery story. Here's what everyone says, but here's what's [underneath]."
The writing itself comes very quickly, but Menand spends a lot of time doing homework, he says. "Part of it is I don't want to say something obvious. I want to give some insight that you don't get elsewhere," he says.
His next project is a book on the Cold War without the politics -- a focus on the movies, books, consumerism, and other culture that surrounded the era. Readers may have to wait a bit: "I'm just getting started," he says.
In the meantime, he'll continue to write about ... well, whatever comes his way. Sometimes it's high culture, and sometimes it's pop culture. It's the connection between the two that he enjoys, something that shows up in a relatively short review of Laurie Anderson's "United States" in "American Studies."
"[She] captures the middle ground between commercial entertainment and high art," he says. To have a place to write about that is a pleasure, he adds. "That's why I love magazines."
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