NONFICTION - April 2, 1995

THE SNARLING CITIZEN: Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $20; 245 pp.) Ehrenreich baby-sits the zeitgeist, and the zeitgeist, she writes, “fully aroused, resembles nothing so much as a toddler in a tantrum or a full-grown Republican in a characteristic outbreak of punitive rage.”

These essays, reprinted from Time, Mirabella, Lear’s, the Nation and the Guardian, range from nightclub satire to solution-seeking for the Modern Age to thinly veiled despair over the future of the United States. Her solution for marital problems? “Have separate ‘marriages’ for separate types of marital functions.” For keeping her son from going to an unaffordable college? “I sent his resume to Colin Powell.” (When this fails, Ehrenreich tries sending the college he gets into “$25,000 instead of the first year’s tuition, but this postmodern witticism fell flat in the university’s business office.”)

In “Reader’s Block” and this is the cynical Ehrenreich, the author proposes that “illiteracy must be seen for what it is--a quiet but determined postmodern rebellion.” On American intervention in Bosnia she writes: “Americans are not known for their restraint in matters involving armed confrontation. There is a tendency, in fact, to flip into a state of uncontrollable, wolfish rage. . . .”

Columnists, they try to encompass the everyday and the infinite. They try to give us boxes and jokes and places to put all our information. They apologize for the news.