Fortune’s Child By Lewis H. Lapham Doubleday, 359 pp., $14.95 Mirrors: I counted at least 15 of them in this smart-bomb essay collection: mirrors that flatter and exalt and truckle all over you. For Lewis H. Lapham, the fawning mirror is a favorite (well, almost an obsessive) image. America stops dead, heart-hit by self-enchantment, like teenage children in front of some silvered storefront window. That ego-stroking moment is static and without other-reference: it has no history or prospects: it is framed and separate: dumb. Some day, Lapham might suggest, America will go quite through the looking-glass. And run face-on into a motel-room wall.
Our dream Trianons are well-appointed: with real peasant folk. Lapham is wicked and exact when it comes to the very rich. He will leave Nelson Rockefeller, say, looking like shot skeet. “Mr. Rockefeller spent his entire life at the metaphysical equivalent of 43,000 feet, suspended by the aerodynamics of money in a state of perpetual innocence.” Yes, and innocence is no virtue: rather it is the most pernicious self-absorption. Think of James Earl Carter positively arrogant with naïveté.
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