Quindlen speaks for the sane in the middle

H.L. MENCKEN, wherever he is, ought to be tickled by his current bumper crop of granddaughters. The quintessentially American tradition of journalist-columnist as individual voice and public consciousness-raiser, chronicler and gadfly is being carried forward by a phalanx of word spinners from the distaff side: Molly Ivins, Ellen Goodman, Maureen Dowd and Katha Pollitt are among the women who leap to mind.

Certainly no such list of bylines would be complete without Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna Quindlen, who for decades has been instant-messaging her opinions and apercus, qualms and indignations, first in the New York Times and now, after a five-year hiatus devoted to fiction writing, in the pages of Newsweek. It’s a good bet that her third collection of opinion pieces, “Loud and Clear,” will be grabbed up by fans eager to revisit what Quindlen had to say about Columbine and gun control, the dangers of alcohol and folly of face-lifts, her takes on her son’s Mohawk, planet Barbie, Jackie Onassis’ ineffable class, the exquisite tedium of motherhood, her own Catholic girlhood. Oh yes, and as a resident of the world’s most powerful island who once lived in the sheltering shadow of the World Trade Center’s twin towers, how she has been dealing with Sept. 11.

Looking back on her start as “an affirmative action hire at the New York Times,” Quindlen writes that she “wound up a so-called lifestyle columnist, with a beat that was the richest, the most interesting, probably the most important, and surely the simplest I had ever had. My body, myself, my kids, my friends. The glass ceiling, the labor room, the first lady, the White House.” If there’s a note of self-congratulation and even complacency mingling with gratitude in this job description, it’s not out of tune with the overall tenor of her columns. It is hard not to envy someone so sure of her choices and abilities that she can write, “I knew to do what I wanted, when I wanted, because I know that today is the only certainty I possess. I’m pretty sure I’ll be a woman who’ll die without regrets.” It is a statement even more impressive in its context: a meditation on the anniversary of her mother’s death, which came when the writer-to-be was only 19.

These short essays -- though often other-oriented, empathetic and outraged in the best way -- reveal a great deal about Quindlen. In aggregate they work on two levels: the topical, grazing many highpoints of our recent national experience, and a personal substrate. Her relationships unfold, indeed richly: the sage and loving mother, the demanding father, the daughter she adulates, the sons she defends. The crotchety neighbor-widow, the girlfriends, the sister-in-law taken by cancer. Willfully or not, this is predominantly a woman’s world. Though the pieces are grouped under five headings -- Heart, Body, Mind, Voice, Soul -- the female physical experience permeates nearly all of them. Heart includes the bottomless fatigue of young motherhood. An exasperated piece in “Soul” deplores the waste of resources represented by invasive airport body searches visited on children, the infirm and, incidentally, the author, post-Sept. 11.

The body personal segues neatly into the body politic, higher minded journalism’s more usual territory. Some of Quindlen’s best pieces focus squarely on current public issues. Her demand for a “parent-child privilege” equivalent to that protecting spouses, doctors or clergy from forced betrayal, elicits a real aha! reaction. She rallies for such causes as cuts in summer programs for city kids (many of whom would lose their one sure meal a day) and the recent scandal of censorship involving the New York Regents’ exam -- in which she says literary texts are “sanitized” to the point of incomprehensibility.

On the whole, however, Quindlen, unlike Dowd and Pollitt, does not push at the edges of our time, she doesn’t set viewpoints on their heads or dish out shocking facts. She is very much a spokesperson for the sane middle: sensible, sometimes wry and sometimes unabashedly sentimental, a bit puritanical as well, saying what many of us have been thinking -- but doing the not inconsiderable favor of putting those inchoate responses into graceful nuggets of prose. Her underlying message: The large is in the small, the small in the large. Nowhere is it put more neatly than in her musing on whether Barbie, who was celebrating her 35th “birthday,” is single-handedly responsible for the popularity of silicone implants and anorexia chic. “Maybe ... that’s too much weight to put on something that’s just a toy. Maybe not. Happy Birthday, Babs. Have a piece of cake. Have two.”