Class Act

By PRISCILLA PAINTON

THE WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES: IRREVERENT NOTES FROM A DECADE OF GREED by Barbara Ehrenreich

Pantheon; 275 pages; $19.95

Wrap socialism, feminism and environmentalism into one person's sensibility, and what you're likely to get is a lousy dinner guest -- someone who will find alienation in a Johnny Carson monologue, pesticides in an arugula salad and phallic symbols in the latest James Bond movie. But in contrast to some of the solemn ideologues who share her causes, Barbara Ehrenreich is a leftist with levity, so don't get discouraged about the title of this provocative new collection of essays.

Unlike those socialists depressed by the Reagan decade who retreated to their seminars on French deconstructionism, Ehrenreich went scrounging for morsels of social insight in chic restaurants, living rooms, corporate offices, Playboy magazines and even a make-believe White House Situation Room. She returns laughing -- at Ronald Reagan; at the American medical system, which would rather produce a "temple-sized ultraquark-powered graviton for the visualization of intestinal gas" than put up with sick people; and at the "unbearable being of whiteness," which led presidential candidate Richard Gephardt to tell "moving stories about his youth as a poor black boy in the South, and how he had inexplicably turned white, clear up to and including his eyebrows."

If humor was Ehrenreich's emotional armor for the 1980s, it is also her best instrument of subversion. While other women are busy pointing fingers at one another for their family and career choices, Ehrenreich makes her case for working mothers by debunking, with the endearing sting of a suburban survivor, the guilt trips thrust upon them. Don't worry about missing your kid's "stages," she says, because "no self-respecting six-year-old wants to be reminded that she was once a fat little fool in a high chair."

Yet her biggest feat is finding a few innocuous ways of bringing up the generally unpalatable subject of class in America. Growing economic polarization, she argues, has made the professional class, which is inherently insecure, more smug and selfish. Much of her evidence involves incidental, sometimes lighthearted perceptions about how this uneasiness reveals itself. To escape association with a shrinking middle class, yuppies have learned to choose the baby bass en croute over the chef's salad, Italian knit sweaters over flannel shirts, running over basketball and handcrafted cabinets over mass-produced maple.

But Ehrenreich often undermines her anthropological wisdom by concluding her essays with whiny pronouncements, as in: "There is something grievously wrong with a culture that values Wall Street sharks above social workers, armament manufacturers above artists, or, for that matter, corporate lawyers above homemakers." And as if to justify her hostility toward yuppies, she insists on painting an idyllic picture of blue-collar Americans as "more intellectually engaged," more generous of spirit and, of course, better in bed. Overall, her observations suffer from a simplistic yearning for a nonexistent era when the poor were not blamed for their poverty, when people did not cram their appointment books and when college graduates pursued ideals instead of salaries. For all her wit and sharp insight, Ehrenreich offers no guarantee that she won't turn up cranky for dinner.