David Brooks's On Paradise Drive
Berens, Bob
ON PARADISE DRIVE: HOW WE LIVE Now AND ALWAYS HAVE IN THE FUTURE TENSE by David Brooks Simon & Schuster, 2004 320 pp $25 ‘‘LET'S TAKE A DRIVE, " begins David Brooks's latest sardonic...
...The Patio Man and Realtor Mom story ends with the couple's returning from their respective shopping sprees to their "miniMcMansion," where, their consumerist "juices still flowing . . . the two erotically charged exurbanites mischievously bound up to the master suite and experience even higher stages of bliss on the Sealy Posturpedic Mattress, on the stainproof Lycron carpeting, and finally and climactically, atop the Ethan Allen Utopia-line settee...
...that, whatever inequality exists in our country today, it is more than made up for by the creative destruction and economic growth it enables...
...Here and there are a few innately Office Depot guys who are trying to blend in with their more manly Home Depot brethren, and not ask Home Depot inappropriate questions, such as "does this toolbelt make me look fat...
...Although Brooks seems to consider himself a student of—if not an ideological heir to—postwar sociologists and social critics such as William H. Whyte and David Riesman, he devotes a lot of energy to undermining the antisuburban tropism their work, in part, inspired...
...Note the reduction of individuals to "Home Depot" or "Office Depot" types...
...Through the hardship of their present life, they dwelt imaginatively in the grandeur that would inevitably mark their future, that would make their sufferings and daring sacrifices worthwhile...
...They saw the possibility of plenty everywhere, yet at the start, they lived in harsh and primitive conditions...
...What may come as a surprise to those who are only acquainted with his journalism and op-ed pieces is that Brooks is at times a competent and interesting observer of the American landscape...
...We've seen them on TV...
...According to Brooks, "Seventy percent of the millionaires surveyed have their shoes resoled and repaired rather than replaced...
...As Brooks has—briefly, euphemistically— raised the issue of economic inequality in present-day America, and even indicated that this country has always been a particularly miserable place to be poor, this "slingshot" redemption, which he offers to those Americans insufficiently equipped with that entrepreneurial drive he can't stop celebrating, is an unforgivably meager consolation...
...In a weird way, the meritocratic system is both too professional and not career-oriented enough...
...they're just a blur on the freeway in his trip from the "urban hipster zone" to the "crunchy suburbs...
...BOB BERENS is a New York-based writer...
...But Brooks's attempts to wrest the suburban ideal from the hands of its critics are less than fully successful...
...This scene isn't only suggestive of how advertisers would like the public to imagine their clients' nationwide sales staff: it's also how they would like us to see ourselves...
...an accurate picture of the real world of work...
...We've all witnessed scenes like this, but not, as Brooks would have it, in real "everyday, ordinary" superstores...
...So what exactly does it mean to live in America, "in the future tense...
...He underestimates the power of his own critique and, as the book drags on, the strain begins to show...
...They live very much like regular middle-class Americans . . . it's just that they work harder, started successful companies, and have a lot more in the bank...
...He grunts inarticulately and nods towards the machines . . . the two manly suburban men have a brief exchange of pseudo-scientific grill argot that neither of them understands, and pretty soon Patio Man comes to the reasoned conclusion that it would make sense to pay a little extra for a grill with Vshaped metal baffles, ceramic rods, and a sidemounted smoker box...
...Today's poor will be tomorrow's dead, the unavoidable casualties of our unending trek towards the new frontier...
...A recurring theme in both On Paradise DISSENT / Fall 2004 n 1 0 7 BOOKS Drive and Brooks's previous book, Bobos in Paradise, is the disconnect between the realities of suburban life and the way it has been characterized in books, movies, and social criticism...
...Note the depiction of the Home Depot salesperson as a friendly, unthreatening co-conspirator in conspicuous consumption...
...There is a genuinely affecting chapter in which Brooks diagnoses the moral, intellectual, and spiritual failings of higher education in America today...
...He quotes a fawning profile by business writer Jim Collins of Colman Mockler, the former CEO of Gillette: " 'His placid persona hid an inner intensity, a dedication to making anything he touched the best it could possibly be—not just because of what he would get, but because he simply couldn't imagine doing it any other way...
...The inner cities and the depressed industrial zones are conspicuous by their absence...
...There is nothing in American Beauty's parade of soul-dead suburbanites to match this brand-name-smeared coupling for grotesque caricature and elitist contempt...
...As an unflaggingly pro-business, laissezfaire free-market conservative, Brooks is obligated to pretend that it is always morning in America...
...He's so conscious of his own audience—educated, New York Timesreading book-buyers, the same people who made a hit out of American Beauty—that he can't resist employing the same tried-and-true put-downs he derides left intellectuals for overusing...
...Some] students operate under the assumption that there are only six professions in the world: doctors, lawyers, corporate executives, and so on...
...as a result, they fall into the familiar ruts...
...and somewhere inside, they've got the little burn, the little engine, that, as Abraham Lincoln's law partner once said of him, knows no rest...
...These omissions make clear that the narrative of outward expansion and residential development described by On Paradise Drive is essentially the story of white flight, told cheerfully from the side of the fleeing...
...What follows is a guided tour of contemporary America, starting from the "Urban Cool Zones," where, according to Brooks, the lattesipping, trendsetting elite reside, to the outer reaches of exurbia, which, in Brooks's cosmology, is home to the new pioneers...
...How nice...
...Its comic low arrives with the story of "Patio Man" and "Realtor Mom," a hard-working and hard-shopping exurbanite couple...
...Brooks attempts to legitimize this conclusion by drawing parallels to our frontier past: The early settlers were aware of, and must have been oppressed by, the obvious potential of this land...
...One can almost picture his Weekly Standard buddies peering over his shoulder as he types, like the overbearing film executives of a bad Hollywood novel...
...He's trying to use the "eternal" character of poverty and hardship in America's history to absolve us of responsibility for its present-day forms...
...And if these students are myopic about career prospects, you can imagine how unprepared they are to imagine what a human life should amount to in its totality...
...BOOKS After the corporate scandals of the last several years, the public standing of CEOs is at an all-time low...
...Come on pal, let's give it a happy ending...
...They haven't been introduced to the massive array of unusual jobs that exist...
...DISSENT / Fall 2004 n 1 0 9...
...Let's take a glimpse at how Americans really live at the start of the twentyfirst century in their everyday, ordinary lives...
...Fortunately for them, writers like Brooks, who spent the boom years touting the "countercultural capitalists" and shattered hierarchies of the new economy, can be counted on to spout the cant of the day...
...The suspense in reading On Paradise Drive derives from wondering how Brooks will pull it off...
...ON PARADISE DRIVE: HOW WE LIVE Now AND ALWAYS HAVE IN THE FUTURE TENSE by David Brooks Simon & Schuster, 2004 320 pp $25 ‘‘LET'S TAKE A DRIVE, " begins David Brooks's latest sardonic celebration of American consumerism, On Paradise Drive...
...OT SURPRISINGLY, Brooks is better at describing the hierarchical ambitions of the upper middle class...
...How will he summon a happy ending out of what amounts to a pretty grim picture of America in the early twenty-first century...
...When he reaches the barbecue display area, a large salesperson . . . comes up to him . . . Patio Man, who has so much lust in his heart, it is all he can do to keep from climbing up on one of these machines and whooping rodeostyle with joy, still manages to respond appropriately...
...Their lives took on a slingshot shape—they had to pull back in order to someday shoot forward...
...When On Paradise Drive strains for grander insights—and bigger laughs—the book falls flat...
...But, predictably enough, Brooks can't resist yoking his best and most sobering insights to an uplifting, right-wing vision of America running more or less as it should...
...Note the familiar gender reversal of the toolbelt gag...
...Patio enters a super-size hardware store in pursuit of "a first-class barbecue grill," "his eyes glistening with a far-away visionary zeal...
...That is, the millionaires...
...They knew and felt that heaven would be realized in this place that was God's greatest gift, but at the moment, they faced starvation...
...Much of this sixty-plus-page survey, which serves as the book's centerpiece and introduction, will be familiar to readers of Brooks's writing for the New York Times...
...When Brooks isn't describing the purely physical details of the suburbs, he sounds less like a Peorian Everyman than a Madison Avenue executive...
...While the twenty-eight million Americans working for poverty-level wages are scarcely mentioned, we are treated to a lengthy portrait of the sober-minded coupon-clippers of America...
...Note the "satire" of the hungry consumer's mindlessly "glistening eyes" and inarticulate grunting, and how all of this ribbing and teasing leads not to a questioning of the expense of or the need for that deluxe-model grill but to a celebration of shopping itself...
...Why bother caring...
...If you're looking for stray examples of what gets lost in a money-driven culture, you could do worse than to read Bobos and On Paradise Drive...
...Apparently, it means to believe, despite any evidence to the contrary, that you will one day be very rich, rendering it foolish to worry about your own more likely economic fate—or the similar likely fates of the majority of your fellow Americans...
...That is, as a hotbed of sexual and emotional repression, rampant consumerism, and conformity in appearance, manners, and thought...
...After taking a survey of contemporary America that excludes the poor and the working class, he concludes that all is well with the republic...
...As it turns out, these feckless capitalists, and their uniquely American propensity for taking big economic risks, are all he has to offer...
...Let's start downtown in one of those urban bohemian neighborhoods, and then let's drive through the inner-ring suburbs and on to the outer suburbs and the exurbs and the small towns and beyond...
...It encourages a professional mind-set in areas 108 n DISSENT / Fall 2004 where serendipity and curiosity should rule, but it does not give students...
Vol. 51 • September 2004 • No. 4
