The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (review)

musters up for this wished-for occasion . A Christmas gathering of the Lamberts would seem to be anything but the traditional holiday celebration Enid imagines. Her children are aU failures of one order or another. Enid's professor son, Chip, was fired over a sexual liaison with a student, accrued significant debt (borrowing over $20,000 from his sister, Denise), engaged in common theft and has lately been fleeing a political upheaval in Lithuania, where he was involved in a fraudulent scheme to fleece American investors. The older brother, Gary, married with three children, a bank vice president, meets Enid's criteria for St. Jude social acceptance, but on the personal side he is a total pragmatist, materialist and buUy like his father (though for aU his bullying he is unable to get his wife and three children to come to St. Jude for one last Christmas). Denise, also successful but divorced, is a disappointment as a daughter. Enid was revolted by Denise's ex-husband (an older man, plus a Jew), but she doesn't know about Denise's other side, her confusion over her sexual preference. If Enid knew everything about her three children, she would surely be depressed. Franzen is a master ofcharacter and of conflicts over behaviors, assumptions, viewpoints. The irony of this group of people joining together on Christmas is well earned in this novel. Corrections? The market undergoes a "gentle letdown," which affects only "fools and the working poor." The Lambert children make some concessions to Enid, though not many. For Enid, the most satisfying corrections— and the novel's finale—come when she harangues the now-institutionalized, disoriented Alfred with a litany of wrongs he has committed in the forty-eight years of their married life (though we do realize that right and wrong are a matter ofjudgmenthere). Designer drugs couldn't possibly measure up, for Enid, to the sense of weU-being she gains in berating him daily. OveraU, The Corrections presents humanity as flawed and corruptible and limited in perspective, but Franzen makes us see the value of our basic humanity, however flawed, as opposed to the more disturbing chemical alternative. (JS) The Metaphysical Club: A Story ofIdeas in America by Louis Menand Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001, 546 pp., $27 Louis Menand knows a lot of history and can get it across lucidly and entertainingly. The Metaphysical Club is his account of the sources and effects of pragmatism in American thought, and it provides a rich taste of the lives and times not only of Menand's four central subjects— Oliver WendeU Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey—but also of dozens of other figures and their ideas, all interacting in complex networks of influence, patronage, coalition and rivalry within their social milieu. We spend time with Henry Abbott, the antiaboUtionist Union soldier who fought alongside Holmes and forever impressed on him an example of courage and professional competence in the absence of belief in a cause. We meet Jane Addams, founder of HuU House, who persuaded John Dewey 180 · The Missouri Review that antagonism is always just a misunderstanding about common goals. We're introduced, too, to the less-weUknown Hetty Robinson, heiress to a New England whaling fortune and probable forger (Peirce and his father were expert witnesses in the legal case fought over the authenticity of her aunt's wiU). Menand gives himself aU the room he needs for these narrative excursions . Louis Agassiz, Swiss paleontogist , discoverer of the Ice Age, rival of Darwin and dabbler in racial theory (he claimed that whites and blacks are differentspecies created separately by God), gets an entire chapter to himself. Another chapter relates the effects of Agassiz's Brazil expedition on the young WUliam James. Menand is a tireless explainer and linker; for instance he lays out a detailed history of statistics and the long-term controversy over free wiU that it sparked among nineteenth-century intellectuals . And he is a master of summary, recapping tricky arguments incisively or loading a single phrase with subtle commentary. He notes, for example, thatHenryJames, Sr., pushed religious universaUsm so stridently "that his ecumenism was sometimes indistinguishable from intolerance." Is an...