Lapham on Luxury

SPOTLIGHT

For over a century, the editor of Harper's wrote a monthly column called "The Easy Chair." Lewis Lapham doesn't go in for the decorous commentary of his predecessors; a practitioner of curmudgeonly journalism in the tradition of Mencken and Twain, he's a master of the scornful gibe. But, as Lapham is quick to point out, his targets "can take care of themselves." His new book, Money and Class in America (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), is an urbane and witty diatribe against what he calls the "equestrian class"—"those who can afford to ride rather than walk and who can buy any or all of the baubles that constitute the proofs of social status."

A graduate of Hotchkiss and Yale, the scion of old wealth—his great-grandfather founded Texaco—Lapham has long dwelled in "the gardens of the American Eden." It's not the possession of money that inspires his wrath but our national pursuit of it, which amounts to blind worship. (His book is subtitled "Notes and Observations on Our Civil Religion.")

Lapham happily aims his barbs at the uppercrust world that nurtured him. "I'm not on the highlife circuit," he insists, lounging around his spacious, bare-walled apartment in the East Sixties. "On weekends I play with my kids and read manuscripts." But he goes out enough to have observed the Mammon-serving hordes on his own turf; his portrait of the "local oligarchs" in his Upper East Side neighborhood is right on the money.

JAMES ATLAS