Money and Class in America.

• Author: Lessard, Suzannah

He bemoans the life of the upper class but can't tear himself away from the dinner parties Lewis Lapham's Lament

Wealth and status are difficult subjects. They are so personal. At the very beginning of Money and Class in America,(*) Lewis Lapham writes:

One more than one occasion I have

passed the night in earnest argument with

a number of otherwise intelligent people

who, although they thought they were talking

about money and class, were talking

about something else. Only at the end,

when the wine was gone and the host was

no longer speaking to most of the guests,

did it occur to the company still in the room

that one of us had been talking about freedom,

another about his lost youth, another

about God.

I can see how lost youth is entangled with the subject because class is a quintessentially family matter--and so is wealth, though to a lesser extent. It's because of this family connection, in my view, that the topic is so personal, painful, and seemingly deep. I think I know how freedom comes into it. Money can make us free, but the wish for money, and even the possession of it, can also imprison us, as can our family, or class background. Lapham's book tells us quite a lot about this. As for the connection between money and class and God, this is never clarified. Perhaps he means that our concepts of Providence originate in childhood and can be dictated by the class and wealth of one's family. It's very easy to confuse inherited wealth with an idea of Providence-endowed superiority--when in fact it may well be a fate of separation from one's true self, of choicelessness, a test of the soul. Or perhaps Lapham just means that when we talk about money and class we end up talking about all sorts of basically unrelated matters that have a deep meaning for us. "We assign spiritual meanings to the text of money," he writes. This is an inspired but imprecise book.

It is also an angry, obsessed book, propelled by pent-up energy. Like the dinner party he describes at the beginning, it rarely seems to be quite about what it's really about. His polished but driven style gives the impression that he can't stop talking, that he was talking this way for a long time before he started writing the book, and that he has gone on talking since. I also got the funny feeling that he had been talking to the very people he is writing about, and they said, "That's brilliant. You should write a book!" The book raises the question, "If you think these people are...