Noonan in Pursuit of Herself : LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS, <i> By Peggy Noonan (Random House: $</i> 23<i> ; </i> 255<i> pp.)</i>

In case you’d filed the name away with Strategic Defense Initiative and floppy bow ties for women, Peggy Noonan is the one who morphed from news producer for Dan Rather to speech writer for Ronald Reagan and documented her reincarnation in the rosily titled “What I Saw at the Revolution.” (Her political memoir earned Noonan tags like “poet laureate of resurgent Republicanism.”) The post-revolutionary years find Peggy Noonan back in New York City, free-lancing for Mirabella and Vanity Fair, dispensing right-wing wisdom on the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, and completing another ambitious-sounding memoir, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

If memoir is the word. Chronologically, “Life” picks up where “What I Saw” left off. Formally and thematically, it swerves into less familiar territory. The first book concerned serving the cause; the second details a life, as Noonan has it, “on pause.” Where “What I Saw” was personal and chatty, “Life” is philosophical and kind of talky. “Life” begins in a hair salon “high above the avenues of Manhattan”; a shampoo and the sound of traffic below prompt the following reverie: “Prosperity and mobility: these have changed our time, changed our country and lives so completely and dramatically, and the funny thing is we all know it, but I don’t think we’ve ever fully absorbed it. . . . There is Old America and New America, and, you know, I miss the hungry years. Okay, now, we’re all done .” This last line belongs to the hair washer.

If this volume has a dominant mood, it’s nostalgia. Noonan writes, as she says, from “an inescapably political perspective,” and it is, in every sense, conservative. She riffs engagingly on the culture clashes she inevitably experiences as a citizen of New York--on coping with her 6-year-old son’s paranoia about marine mammals dying at the hands of capitalist polluters, for instance, or coping with a reelection rally for mayor David Dinkins: “I’d planned to stand in back but there was no back, so I stood up front, twenty feet from the stage. Gloria Steinem spoke and said, ‘Look behind you--behind you is a revolutionary brother,’ and even these people looked around and laughed: Hey lady, behind me is probably a pickpocket.”

Crime and taxes continue to erode the “liberal era”; ever since we were deceived by George Bush’s lips, Noonan concedes, the revolution hasn’t been what it was, either. The middle portion of “Life” zeros in on Washington. Noonan spends a good portion of 1991 shuttling down to the beltway to help jump-start Bush’s reelection campaign, but her efforts ultimately fizzle. She discerns an inertia in the White House, a lot of squabbling and a dangerous laxity, as evidenced by the president’s inability to get a cup of tea promptly delivered--forget about a White House car. There’s also the problem of the vision thing: “They kept saying, ‘You’ll be in charge of the message.’ I kept saying, ‘But what is the message?’ ” The problem, by Noonan’s reckoning, outlasts the Administration: “Clinton seems to have a general philosophy--a kind of emotional liberalism. But the particulars aren’t there.”

Noonan sizes up the ’96 Republican hopefuls--none of whom fire her up quite the way the Great Communicator did, and apparently still does. Without making a direct appearance, her former boss casts a Rushmore-size shadow across these pages. Very casually, in bites and throwaways, she manages to relieve Ronald Reagan of any responsibility for his term’s darker aspects: Iran-Contra “delegitimized” not the presidency but the television networks, which created the clamor for the hostage release. A brief exegesis on “what is called the homeless situation” cleverly concludes: “This is where thirty years of urban liberalism have gotten us: in New York dogs can’t (defecate) on the sidewalks but people can.” While she envisions a socially moderate Republican succeeding Clinton, Noonan’s personal sympathies appear to square with the tougher talk out of Atlanta two years ago: Hollywood is poisoning the culture, homosexual “lifestyles” shouldn’t be “espoused” in schools--oh, and it’s time we stop applauding single mothers.

In light of her firm family values, one might reasonably expect some discussion regarding the circumstances of Noonan’s own single motherhood, but fathers don’t figure in this telling. “If there is any revolution” in her second book, Noonan writes, “it is one that is happening within me”--a reference to the author’s rediscovery of her Catholic faith, which forms the focus of “Life’s” final section. Odd, then, that this is the less intimate work. The voice is confiding, but the confidences, where they occur, usually concern others. A “knower of the people in the columns” now, Noonan always seems to be sitting next to someone in Washington (Clarence Thomas, Pamela Harriman), in New York (Barry Diller, Donald Trump) and probably in between. We’re privy to Trump’s analysis of his dinner date’s anatomy, to the sympathy Katherine Graham feels for Barbra Streisand (all those pesky autograph hounds!). “Success for me,” Noonan discloses, “has been, essentially, getting invited to things I don’t want to go to but like saying I went to.” Got it.

And yet . . . the invitations begin to pale: “I found I wasn’t drawn to and charmed by experience anymore--at least the kind of experience that is being at the party, the convention, in the hot air balloon.” She consults a former Jesuit priest. She prays and attends Mass during the week and convenes with friends to study the Bible. “Bible-study groups,” Noonan advises, “are where the real ecumenism is happening in America.” Possibly, but as she describes it, there’s something less than inclusive about Noonan’s spiritual awakening. Consider her response to a friend’s account of a religious retreat with a well-known Indian guru: “Maybe the good thing about ashrams and all this is it can make clear to you that God is the destination. Then you go home and sit down and figure, this is a good destination but I think I’ll take another route. I think I’ll go by that church down the block and get a road map.”

In “What I Saw at the Revolution” Noonan convincingly characterized her political rebirth as a response to hypocrisies she perceived within the anti-war movement. Her disaffection with boomer-style cafe society is also understandable; but this time around her convert’s zeal is less becoming. Inescapably, political perspectives have their limitations. They probably serve speech writers well, and revolutionaries of all stripes, but from our poets laureate, whatever their persuasions, we expect more encompassing visions.