The CEO of The Sofa, by P.J. O’Rourke.
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001.
$25 — 288 pages.

Fans of P.J. O’Rourke, author of such books as Republican Party Reptile and Give Way A Chance, may find some respite from our recent troubles by turning to O’Rourke’s The CEO of the Sofa. Known for his humorous looks at the U.S. government (Parlia-ment Of Whores) and foreign policy (Holidays In Hell), and inspired by Oliver Wendell Holmes’ classic The Autocrat At The Breakfast Table, O’Rourke turns in The CEO Of The Sofa to a wide variety of subjects, taking on everything from the election of Hilary Clinton to the design of baby diapers.

Here is O’Rourke on the sagacity of women in management positions. Seeing his wife, home from a day at the office, peacefully ending a tantrum thrown by their 2 year old, O’Rourke decides that women make good managers because they have read books on child care. He writes:

I opened Your One- Year-Old at random and ... the shock of recognition was so severe that the vermouth bottle almost dropped from my hand. Listen to these excerpts from the chapter titled “Characteristics of the Age:”

° He seems to want everything, to prefer everybody else have nothing.

° A busy little person. Though much of his activity is purely ... bumbling around from one spot to another.

° Almost anything may attract his attention, and then he almost seems to have to respond, without rhyme or reason.

° Extremely self-involved. He relates to others if and when it pleases him.

° All too likely to put on a full-fledged temper tantrum over what may actually be only a minor frustration.

° Can be seen as enchanting if the viewer appreciates an almost total egocentricity.

Is that not the most brilliant description of management ever limned? Consider the management in the Clinton White House. What had I been doing wasting my time reading What Flavor Is Your Poison Pill? and The 137,240 Secrets of Highly Concise People?

After finishing a book by O’Rourke, the reader may be tempted to read aloud to friends. Here are just a few quotes to take with you from the current volume:

Having one kid is like owning a dog  albeit a dog that stays a puppy for twenty-two years and never learns to fetch anything but credit card bills and nose colds.

The Goddess of Winter is stern and self-disciplined. The Goddess of Fall is fruitful and wise. The Goddess of Spring is full of hope. But the Goddess of Summer is naked, if we can get her to drink two more Mai Tais.

Because Jakob (Dylan) can carry a tune and write songs that make sense, critics feel that he lacks his father’s talent.

If George W. Bush and Al Gore had grown up on my block in Toledo, Ohio, they wouldn’t have gone to Yale and Harvard. They would have gone to Kent State. Easy to picture them there circa 1970 — Al picking up on the hippie thing a little late, ordering his bell-bottoms from the Sears catalog, and George W. in a real National Guard unit, shooting Al.

°°°

Kathleen Norris’ The Virgin Of Bennington is also funny, though unintentionally so (and perhaps funny to me only because I read it immediately after reading O’Rourke, with O’Rourke’s voice and laughter still ringing in my head). This latest book by Norris tells the story of her youth, her student years at Bennington College, and her work with Elizabeth Kray, who ran the Academy of American Poets.

Norris, the author of The Cloister Walk, Dakota, and Amazing Grace, is more annoying than usual in this memoir. She annoys for the same reasons that she annoys in her books about spirituality — her style is cloying and emotion, she is intellectually sloppy, and she interprets her data without regard to any biblical or dogmatic truth. When writing about God, for example, Norris writes so much about herself as well that she seems in danger of confusing her own personality with that of the deity.

In The Virgin Of Bennington — by virgin, Norris must intend some esoteric virginity, as she has an affair with a married professor — Norris writes, “I happened to come to the Academy at a time of great literary ferment in America.” We are supposed to believe that she has something to tell us about the state of letters in New York in the seventies, yet she seems oblivious to the fact that every decade of the last century was a time of “great literary ferment.” Her attitude here — that she herself, her presence, gives significance to a place, a time, or an event — is the attitude that makes Norris so popular a spiritual writer today. She explores God — or in the case of the present volume, New York and poetry — as if God, New York, and poetry were created as toys for amusement.

Norris’ portrait of Betty Kray, which takes up most of the book, gives some insights into the world of poetry in the 1960s and 1970s, yet Norris mentions so many times how much Kray disliked “provincial America” that the provincial readers may rightfully regard Kray as both a snob and a provincial. To a girl in a school library who has trouble coming up with three metaphors for an English assignment, Norris writes that Betty Kray “... might have whispered to the girl: Get out — get as far away from this place as you can — while you’re still young — get out of the barren stream before it dries you to a husk.”

On the back of the book is a photograph of the author sitting in 1971 in a New York park beneath a fountain topped by an angel whose right hand is extended forth in blessing. Wearing no make-up, her long dark hair parted in the middle, hands in her lap, dark clothes, Norris looks as if she has posed for the opening shot of an MTV number. The pose is quintessentially her style: obsessed with self, dramatic, and ultimately silly.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville.)

 

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