Drunk & Driven
On Paradise Drive by David Brooks
On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense
Simon and Schuster, 2004
(304 pages; $25.00, hardcover)
reviewed by John C. “Chuck” Chalberg
David Brooks is at it again—sort of. In his first book, the New York Times columnist and self-proclaimed “comic sociologist” examined the highly materialistic lives of post-sixties bourgeois bohemians; hence the provocative Bobos in Paradise. This time his targets are the residents of America’s “paradise drives,” or the exurbians of the wholly new communities that “arise out of nothing” beyond the suburban rings that surround our urban cores.
First there was the smirking David Brooks, who mocked the shallowness of the sixties generation and the “bobos” who would follow in their designer sandals. Now we have a more sober-sided David Brooks, who is bent on unearthing the depths beneath the well-fertilized soccer fields, golf courses, and lawns of these “sprawling communities.”
Born Drunks
While Brooks may be sober, his subjects, at least figuratively speaking, are not. Borrowing from G. K. Chesterton, Brooks agrees that Americans are “born drunk.” Fortified by this ultimate in home brews, Americans are not just ready to dream the American dream, but to live it as well. For Brooks’s exurbian subjects, this means many wakeful hours of hard work and hard play, as well as an occasional wakeful hour spent in the “imagined land of the future.”
If “bobo” captured Brooks’s first prey, “so-so,” as in soccer sophisticates, might do for these exurbians for whom work and play are virtually interchangeable enterprises. “So-so” also captures Brooks’s ambivalence about a subset of Americans whom he gently ridicules and yet quietly admires.
Perhaps that ambivalence is traceable to Brooks’s self-deprecating self-awareness. The author who saw a piece of himself among the “bobos” now looks into his own garage and sees a “vast landscape of protective gear,” the better to face life as a parent when dangers lurk on paradise drive. By his own rueful admission, David Brooks’s nine-year-old daughter is already a “four-helmet kid.”
The question that drives this book is not whether America’s children are over-protected, but whether Americans in general are as shallow as we appear to be. Brooks thinks not. And while we’re at it, the question that hovers over this book is this: Is America doomed to decline and fall? Once again, Brooks thinks not. Or at least not any time soon.
Conventional wisdom and classical morality have it that money first enervates and then eventually corrupts. Not so in America, responds Brooks. Here “success is never good enough [and] competition never stops.” This is especially the case in exurbia, where the future is always now—and now is always some time in the future.
John C. Chalberg writes from Minnesota.
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