Peggy Noonan’s new volume The Time of Our Lives brings together some of the columnist’s greatest hits. She writes about the peaceful 1990s, the shock of September 11, what it’s like to write a major speech for a president in time of crisis (in this case, Ronald Reagan’s Challenger speech), and many other aspects of American (and indeed Western) culture.
Noonan has for a long time been one of the best at describing the background milieu in which we live out our respective three score and ten. She seems constantly to be asking the simplest questions: What are people doing? What do their actions mean? Asking the simplest questions does not mean that her analyses are simple. Indeed, she sees the world the way that one reads a novel. Her description of Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign sounds as if Jane Austen had set the scene: “[he] always seems alone out there, a guy with a mic pacing an empty stage. All by himself, removed from the other humans. It’s sad-looking. It’s not working.”
In another passage, she describes attending Margaret Thatcher’s funeral in London:
London….On his coat he wore Sir Thomas More’s gold chain
of office….Imagine a nation that puts such a man to death, contemplates it,
concludes in the end it was wrong and now proudly displays the
saint’s chain at its greatest events.
Noonan’s eye for detail often yields fruit that helps us to understand the phenomena we are looking at with her. Sometimes she simply states what she knows to be true, which do not admit of any proof for the reader: “I had grown up reading Jimmy Breslin and Murray Kempton: They sounded exactly how they talked, which I would later find out in person, when meeting them, but somehow knew long before.” This seems like a reach, but it’s refreshing to read a writer who simply says what she takes to be true without sussing out all the details.
Part of Noonan’s charm is precisely this reaching, this attempt to see meaning in the mundane. In her introduction, she explains that the title of the volume is based on “an observation of the writer Laurens van der Post: ‘We live not only our own lives but, whether we know it or not, also the life of our time.’” Noonan’s eye for poetry in the mundane allows her to articulate the time of our lives, even as she appreciates each individual person’s life and actions.
Ian Lindquist is Fellow at the Public Interest Fellowship in Washington, D.C.
