NONFICTION - Dec. 25, 1994

GOING TOO FAR ENOUGH: American Culture at Century’s End by Henry Southworth Allen (Smithsonian Institution Press: $21; 244 pp.). You can’t get blood from a stone; that means, for the typical writer, you’re only as good as your subject. “Going Too Far Enough,” by Washington Post cultural critic Henry Southworth Allen, makes that readily apparent, for the essays collected here range from the admirable to the trivial. Dealing with the latter first: Who wants to read another predictable journalistic take on Zsa Zsa Gabor? Stephen Hawking? The Miss America Pageant? The 1980s? Nobody; these pieces should have stayed in the morgue (although the last-mentioned essay is almost worth reading for the line “there were now so many famous people in America we hadn’t heard of half of them”). Allen does a much better job with offbeat topics, the kind that make newspaper editors roll their eyes. The essay on “tract mansions” is devastating if you share Allen’s wonderment at those who buy huge, Tara-like houses on tiny lots; the article on summer houses is charming, likewise, if you’ve ever been in a lakeside cottage populated with battered Dick Francis novels. Allen compares working at the New York Daily News in the late 1960s to entering a diorama at the Museum of Natural History; a former Marine, he gives loving descriptions of close-order drill, calling military parades Washington’s answer to Broadway theater. “Going Too Far Enough” is a book to read selectively, for although Allen can be a lyrical writer--he’s also an award-winning poet--his subjects often let him down.