MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH AMERICA: The Cautionary Tale of A Cheerful Conservative.

• Author: Thompson, W. Scott
• Position: Review

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH AMERICA: The Cautionary Tale of A Cheerful Conservative By Norman Podhoretz Free Press, $25.00

NORMAN PODHORETZ, WHILE touring Asia years ago, commented that no matter what detours we make professionally, we always feel soundest when we return to that in which we were trained. This is particularly true in this fine and revealing book. When Podhoretz works outward from literature, in which he was so well educated, to the political themes of the day, he is on his firmest ground and dazzles.

The book centers around a reflection on anti-Americanism both abroad and within the radical elite emerging during the Vietnam War. Dealing with anti-Americanism almost had to be the defining dilemma of an internationalist American of Podhoretz's generation. We are just too rich and too successful to be left alone on our pedestal. Few have written as eloquently--or with more pain--of the ironies and injustices that accompany the tirades we receive abroad (when our foreign friend isn't seeking a scholarship to Harvard, trading on the NASDAQ, or using our courts to gain advantage from us). This, after all, is the book's theme, its title, and its passion.

For Podhoretz the highest injustice was domestic, when local radicals (read `negroes,' as he often calls them) join anti-patriotism to anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism rightly angers him and dominates the background of the book. But he admits it had become advantageous to him (as to others) to be Jewish in America, so one is forced to wonder why this otherwise appropriate concern figures so powerfully herein.

Podhoretz is at his best in showing how we as a culture worked through our understanding of our American selves and our genius through literature--by (for example) a timely analysis of early Bellow, when that kindred spirit can't quite deal with his (American) identity. Thus Augie March, he argues, fails, because Bellow "had not yet quite been liberated from the old attitudes toward America to which the novel was issuing a multifaceted challenge."

The problem with Norman Podhoretz at almost all times is that he doesn't quite know where he fits in. Thus he gets...