America for Dummies

America for Dummies

In ‘Across the Pond,’ Terry Eagleton Explains the U.S.

By DWIGHT GARNER

Published: July 11, 2013

For several years I worked under a literary editor who, whenever he encountered a new volume he thought had little reason to exist, would hold it aloft and announce, his voice bright with sarcasm, “Well, here’s a necessary book.”

Enlarge This Image



Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

ACROSS THE POND

An Englishman’s View of America

By Terry Eagleton

178 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.

HOW TO READ LITERATURE

By Terry Eagleton

216 pages. Yale University Press. $26.

Enlarge This Image



Oliver Eagleton

Terry Eagleton

That editor’s voice rang in my ears as I picked up the two new books from the prolific British literary critic Terry Eagleton, “Across the Pond: An Englishman’s View of America” and “How to Read Literature.”

These are much-trampled topics. No writer should approach either unless he’s certain of being very charming indeed. Approaching both in one season is like fiddling with two of the colored wires while trying to defuse a homemade bomb.

Mr. Eagleton is best known for the heavy lifting he performed in his classic volume “Literary Theory: An Introduction” (1983), and for the carnage strewn more recently in “Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate” (2009). In that book he put neoatheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins in his sights, as well as a good deal of organized religion.

It’s plausible that he might inject new life into the subjects at hand here.

“Across the Pond” and “How to Read Literature,” each nearly as slim as a pretzel rod, find him in raconteur mode — jolly and coasting. This is not the most graceful pace for Mr. Eagleton. Turning the pages of each, you frequently get that most queasy of literary sensations: that of encountering a writer who isn’t as charming as he thinks he is.

“Across the Pond” contrasts the British and the Americans in all the ways they’ve been contrasted before. He likes us both, the big lug, even if we Americans tend to be fatter, to smile too much, to have little sense of history, to be gullibly religious and flummoxed by irony.

Mr. Eagleton has a lively mind, and his best sentences have a curmudgeonly salt crust. But he too often pushes his observations into sub-Dave Barry, over-the-falls-in-a-barrel comic overkill. Here he is on American’s fondness for the word “like”:

“It is rumored that you can now find tombstones in the States reading: ‘To Our Beloved Son, Brother and Like Husband.’ There are also proposals to modernize certain timeworn slogans to ‘In Like God We Trust’ and ‘My Country Like ’Tis of Thee.’ There will no doubt soon be headlines in The Washington Post reading: ‘I Was Like “Oh My God!” Says President of Harvard.’ ”

Like, let’s get out of here, as Shaggy of “Scooby-Doo” liked to say. I bet they can insert a laugh track — or, more authentically, the sound of crickets — into the audio version.

It’s easy to pick nits from a book like “Across the Pond.” Some of these nits are swollen; they more resemble ticks. About the illusion of social mobility, he argues that Americans think as follows:

“As long as you have enough willpower and ambition, the fact that you are a destitute Latino with a gargantuan drink problem puts you at no disadvantage to graduates of the Harvard Business School when it comes to scaling the social ladder. All you need to do is try.”

Few in America think this. We do think that if you try, however, your children may have a shot at moving up that ladder.

Mr. Eagleton shook the pan a few years ago when he accused Martin Amis, on meager evidence, of being an Islamophobe. In “Across the Pond” he manages to sound far less than progressive himself. About the backlash that imperial power can stir he writes, “This did not stop the British from torturing and massacring their colonial subjects from time to time, but they did so in a modest, unassuming kind of way, as though they were offering them a much sought-after service.” Even in subjugation, I suppose, style is everything.

The least happy thing about “Across the Pond” is how hoary its range of reference mostly is. We are only on Page 2 before Mr. Eagleton hauls out that great taxidermied owl, Alexis de Tocqueville. He leans heavily on Charles Dickens’s and Henry James’s analyses of the American character.

There’s nothing wrong with this. But so many excellent and incisive things have been written about America vs. England by other writers, many of them still alive, that “Across the Pond” seems dated. It mostly could have been written in 1971, if not 1921.

Mr. Eagleton refers to “How to Read Literature” as “a guide for beginners.” He hopes to “demolish the myth that analysis is the enemy of enjoyment,” and he just about gets that done.

But here too the fireworks often explode before he has had time to run away. (“The Creation was the first item on the divine agenda, before God went on to organize dreadful weather for the English and in a calamitous lapse of attention allowed Michael Jackson to slip into existence.”)

Here too the range of reference is not, as the feminine hygiene ads liked to put it, so fresh. He meditates on Shakespeare and Austen and Dickens and Melville and Milton, among others. This is lovely. But he considers the work of few writers born after 1940. A sense that you might be reading Mortimer Adler sneaks in.

I have been, I fear, hard on Mr. Eagleton. There are many things to like in both of these volumes, which belong on that long bookstore shelf one wants to label “Blah Books With Bright Bits.”

Allow me to end with one of these bits. Here is his final take on us plucky and headstrong Americans:

“The good news about the citizens of this kindly, violent, bigoted, generous-spirited nation is that if ever the planet is plunged into nuclear war, they will be the first to crawl over the edge of the crater, dust themselves down, and proceed to build a new world. The bad news is that they will probably have started the war.”