Culture of Complaint

It's hard not to be stirred up and entertained by the three jeremiad-essays Hughes (Barcelona, 1992, etc.) offers here. He goes scatter-shooting at cows with very broad sides: the American talent for the twin fetishes of victimhood and redemption ; the PC academy ( 'The Canon,' that oppressive Big Bertha whose muzzle is trained...at the black, the gay, and the female. The Canon, we're told, is a list of books by dead Europeans - Shakespeare and Dante and Tolstoy...you know them, the pale patriarchal penis people ); postmodern architects ( the pediment-quoting Ralph Laurens of their profession ); Jean-Michel Basquiat ( the black Chatterton of the 80's ). Hughes deplores the multi-culti scare of a cultural establishment unwilling to stand up to the Jesse Helms-types and thus retreating into an homogenization that doles out quality to all so that none will rise too high to be chopped down. But real European- or Australian-style multiculturalism, he argues, is of great benefit - a haunting of one culture by another, an enrichening. So far so good (if glitzy: for Time's art-critic, there's no idea whose subtlety can't be sacrificed for a clever line). But the swaggering postures Hughes assumes all over the room are convincing only in the brightest-lit corners. He does a little historical background for his best point - that art for Americans has always been a therapeutic activity - but elsewhere hardly a background is shaded in. The problematics behind our melding of cultures, behind a moral issue such as abortion, or underlying formalism and shock-aesthetics - these Hughes avoids drilling into deeply. Mostly, it seems, he's writing to the small, disenchanted section of the same go-go cultural guild he bewails; in such tight company, he has to do little more than press journalistic hot buttons cleverly. Not since John Gardner's On Moral Fiction (1978) have we had such a pellet-gun shower of right-wing leftism, back-to-basics positivism - and like Gardner's, it settles down more as vanitas than veritas. (Kirkus Reviews)