Pop sociology's favorite nerd hits the road.
DAVID BROOKS' latest stab at pinning down and defining American behavioral habits, On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense, is as clunky as its title. A messy collection of observations, critiques and theories, the book delves into the migration and consumption patterns of peripatetic, postmodern America, from the Northeast to the Southwest, from cities to sidewalk-less suburbs to free-floating utopian communities without city centers-what Brooks calls "exurbs."
"It's as if Zeus came down and started plopping vast towns in the middle of the farmland and the desert overnight," Brooks writes of this last category. "The food courts come first and the people follow." As more businesses relocate to the suburbs, these areas have grown less dull (read: less WASPy). In today's suburbs, Brooks tells us, one can now find "lesbian dentists, Iranian McMansions, Korean megachurches."
That's not the case in exurbia. Here families like their days disruption-free, their lives clean and orderly and their parking lots the size of Kansas. They live by a "Zenlike golf ideal," writes Brooks, author of the 2001 bestselling book, Bobos in Paradise. "The perfect human being, defined by golf, is competitive and success-oriented, yet calm and neat while casually dressed. Everything he owns looks as if it is made of titanium, from his driver to his Blackberry to his wife's Wonderbra." Exurbia is a shapeless wasteland of identical houses, boxy chain stores and neighborhoods with more lanes than a bowling alley. Also, exurbia is inhabited by middle-class, mostly white Republicans.
The problem with Brooks is not that he over-generalizes. It's that, like his Times colleague Thomas Friedman, Brooks has never met a cutesy, zeitgeist-capturing metaphor or playful phrase that he didn't cram into a blender and then try to inject into the modern vernacular. Brooks is so in love with his own cheeky turns-of-phrase and cocktail-party hyphenations that every chapter is bogged down by attempts to coin catchy new terms. We meet Ubermom (highly motivated, has "multiorgasmic intercourse"), Patio Dad ("manly Home Depot brethren," likes to "wear NASCAR glasses"), the Achievatron (our system of education that grooms Harvard grads from nursery school). Not only does none of the above have the staying power of, say, a phrase like "bobos" (Brooks should have quit while he was ahead), but a good chunk of the book reads like outtakes of the previous bestseller, only with less clarity and purpose. Not to mention that entire chapters are cut-and-paste jobs from people who should have had moratoriums put on their quotes: Orwell, Whitman, Santayana, De Tocqueville.
On middle America, Brooks comes off as an East Coast elitist, highbrow and nose-upward, the type of person he bashes at length in Bobos. Writing on today's youth, he sounds like an out-of-touch dad. ("As one male student put it, in a phrase I heard a few times, 'Bros before hos.'") On women's shopping habits, he just sounds like a bad stand-up comic.
Brooks is strongest when attacking cherished qualities of liberals, or "toe exhibitionists"-among other things, their love of organic food chains, faux-primitive decorative artifacts and socially conscious ice cream. "[A]ll the cashiers [at Trader Joes] look as if they are on loan from Amnesty International." In "Crunchy suburbs," he writes, parents tend to prefer kid names like "Milo and Mandela" to John and Mary.
At its best, Brooks' writing has a smart-alecky, P.J. O'Rourke quality; his tone is light, never pedantic. Though his Times columns have been forgettable scribbles that lack the fire of Safire and Krugman, Brooks, in his books at least, is clever in discerning and defining the American psyche (at least for people who live in the exurbs), but he admits he's puzzled by what he sees, like how Americans can be so religious yet simultaneously wed to money and material possessions like Hummers. As the pastures beyond our cities morph into ever more convoluted entities, expect Brooks to be there to chronicle these changes and shine a light on America with all its vices.