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Sunday, April 04, 2004

A FIRST-RATE WRITER

Okay, so David Brooks, New York Times columnist and chronicler of upper middle class American life, has been roughed up by various magazine writers and bloggers lately, and people are taking sides.

On one side are those who loathe him because he's a first-rate writer who's lent his high-profile mediagenic powers to the conservative cause. Like Bill Kristol, he's smooth, sexy, and rightwing. (Where are the good-looking witty liberals? The Brooks counterpart at the Times is Paul Krugman ...) There are also those who claim he's lazy and inaccurate in his cultural generalizations and therefore should not be taken seriously.

As Noam Scheiber suggests in The New Republic, some element of this response is envy - Brooks got all the goodies, and this seems unfair. But by my reckoning, given that Brooks's writing puts almost everybody else's to shame (look at his piece in today's NYTimes magazine), he deserves his success. It's always upsetting to me when good things happen to bad writers (see the Annual Bad Writing Contest for examples), and it's always a cause for celebration when the gods finally smile on a great writer like Brooks who deserves to be read.

Nobody cares whether some of Brooks's observations about American culture aren't empirically unimpeachable; like all great writers, he carries us along on a cloud of delighted assent by virtue of the fundamental rightness of his perceptions and the reliability of his sensibility. His humor, decency, energy, and kindness shine through in his writing so strongly that we can read his satirical descriptions of our American absurdities without taking offense.

The tone of his recent column telling American high school students to relax about the whole getting into college thing was quite genial, for instance; but underlying Brooks's gentle reminder that it really doesn't matter as much as they and their parents think it does where they go to school was sadness at the neurotic careerists so many sixteen-year-olds in this country have turned into. I've blogged already about the way some professors fuck up their precocious children by making too much of their exceptionality and too little of the humanity they have in common with everyone else. It's this slice of "Blue" America that Brooks is trying to reach with his admonitions about academia.

The main thing I wanted to say, though, is that the bedrock of Brooks's power as a writer, for me, is not merely his enviable writing style (though that's a lot of it), but his in fact staggeringly canny perceptions about... well, me. Say what you want about this and that inaccuracy, the man has definitively got my number.

I live in the same county in Maryland where he does - Montgomery County - and damned if he hasn't walked by my house and taken note of the tell-tale blue wrapper of our New York Times (The Washington Post ain't good enough for the assortively mated professors in that house!) -- not to mention our Chocolate Lab, our fuel-efficient foreign car, and our Krups coffee-maker.

Of course it's always a pleasure to read endless stylish pages devoted to characterizing in great detail one's much-loved self -- but these aren't simple narcissistic self-recognitions. They are exercises in cultural self-awareness that help me clarify precisely what I - and others - represent in larger American terms. Other people - Christopher Lasch comes to mind - do something very similar, and have been similarly valuable to me. But Brooks lacks the disdainful posture of people like Lasch; he implicates himself in the culture of narcissism he describes, and somehow makes things both alarming and forgiveable.