David Brooks, On Paradise Drive

Simon & Schuster, 2004. 320 pages, hardcover. $25.00

Many books on suburbia aren’t really about the suburbs. Suburbia is just the setting for modern American life, and some authors are keen to tell us how messed up our lives really are. Others, like David Brooks, insist that suburbia (and America) is really quite dandy—although in his telling it is a pretty silly place. Brooks seems to have realized that clear-eyed assessments of suburban normalcy can’t compete with colorful caricatures of material excess. So, he has combined a lampoon of suburban consumerism with a thoughtful vindication of the American middle class. The question is whether readers will find the sober argument as persuasive as the colorful send-up.

Brooks divides our suburban world into “zones” that might bear a passing resemblance to conventional zoning categories, but he defines them through clever observations about brand names and fashion trends. His most entertaining chapter, an imaginary drive through these various neighborhoods, begins well inside the city borders, in the trend setting “cool zone,” which displays “a stimulating mixture of low sexuality and high social concern” and where many people have “dreadlock envy.” Farther out, the first suburbs we encounter are the “crunchy” ones, with their own strict codes of anti-fashion, but which stand out as the “last bastions of anticommercialism.” Nearby are the most desirable suburbs of all, those in which “it is apparently socially acceptable to buy a luxury car so long as it comes from a country that is hostile to U.S. foreign policy.” Residual anti-suburban yearning remains visible in the centers of these towns, which “have performed the neat trick of being clearly suburban while still making it nearly impossible to park.” Here the successful professionals can set foot on actual sidewalks while on their way to one-of-a-kind restaurants and boutiques. This is the habitat of the “bourgeois bohemians” whose consumption habits Brooks chronicled in his previous book, Bobos in Paradise.

Paradise Drive, however, extends far beyond bobo heaven into remote suburbs uncharted by the chattering classes. Brooks employs enough familiar names and shapes to convince us that we recognize each of his zones, although they are composite types rather than real places. For example, Brooks takes us to “immigrant enclaves” because he is fascinated by the first generation acquisition of the most visible trappings of suburban affluence. “These peoples’ attitudes about their millions are roughly the same as Pamela Anderson’s attitude about her breasts: they worked damn hard to get them, and now that they’ve got them they are sure as hell going to show them off.” In fact, immigrants who have proudly arrived in the American upper-middle class tend not to cluster in ethnic ghettos, but for Brooks that is beside the point, since the differences between his zones are ultimately as superficial as those between competing brands of toilet paper.

Brooks’s main interest has shifted out to the exploding exurbs, the newest and most complete realization of the suburban ideal. This is the land of ultimate sprawl, although New Urbanists will be bemused to learn that Brooks considers their planned front-porch communities like Kentlands, Maryland, to be the prototypes of exurban development. He either does not know or does not take seriously the New Urbanists’ aspirations to reinvent the suburb. Exurban communities where people stroll down their street and say “howdy” to their neighbors undoubtedly exist in the U.S., but they are more often found in the advertisements that Brooks freely cites. More typical of exurbia are widely spaced houses in isolated subdivisions, connected by wide roads lined with shopping strips and parking lots.

Here, in Brooks’s telling, you find people who have fled the congested and sophisticated inner suburbs in order to live the life of Patio Man, who lusts after lawn tractors, and Realtor Mom, whose trips to the Price Club demonstrate the suburban rule: “the bigger the car, the thinner the woman.” Brooks probably suspects that he is writing for a bobo audience that might need to be convinced of this new American normality. So he offers up caricatures for them to devour and hopes that they might sit still long enough to be told that this suburban frontier is the America that really matters, and not only to the future of the Republican Party. As a place unfettered by history or tradition, it is the most complete version of the American Dream to date, Brooks seems to be saying, and it is the life most Americans aspire to. The exurbs are booming everywhere, and the most thoroughly exurban cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix are growing fastest of all. Brooks does not think the “cool zones” and “crunchy suburbs” are dying, but they are sideshows, as are the very rich and the very poor, whether in Manhattan or Detroit. Many inhabitants of the inner, cooler zones think that a paved countryside and endless traffic jams reveal a suburban America that has gone seriously wrong, and that new ideas about urban design are called for. Brooks does not dispute those views — he ignores them.

Few readers will be offended by Brooks’s caricatures, since most will not recognize themselves in them (they will, however, recognize the people in the next suburb over, the one where people are so snooty, whether because of or in spite of their wealth). It’s all in good fun. The book is very different from, for example, James Howard Kunstler’s savagely funny and equally over-the-top mockery of suburban folkways in The Geography of Nowhere. Kunstler is deadly earnest, whereas there is no Swiftian ferocity on Paradise Drive. Brooks is less a satirist than a clown who wants to be taken seriously. Although his ability to deliver philosophy with a spoonful of sugar may gain him a wide audience, it demands a tricky balancing act. It’s not easy to tell which of his factoids are intended as jokes, and which are to be taken seriously.

Brooks’s caricatures of the middle class are about as subversive as, say, those on The Simpsons, and he is no more committed to suburban reform than the Fox network. He can make fun of suburban foibles with the best of them, but then he devotes the rest of the book to arguing that you’re missing something if you conclude that Americans are “the spoiled blond bimbos of the earth.” If we are, Brooks asks, then why does America remain so prosperous, vital, and envied? Here the book turns serious—sometimes for pages on end—and even ambitious. Brooks is in pursuit of no less a prey than the American character.

Brooks puts forward a grand theory in a Halloween costume: America, in the eyes of the rest of the world, is the Cosmic Blonde of nations, cheerfully oblivious to its cultural squalor. But this American optimism conceals a deeper and darker quest, one with ample traces of Cotton Mather’s Puritan exhortations and of the individualist spirit observed by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1830. In Brooks’s America, crunchy suburbanites and Realtor Moms alike work hard, are insanely optimistic, and, sadly, are not having nearly as much fun as foreigners might think. The proof that Americans aren’t as shallow as they appear is that they aren’t as happy, either. Americans are driven by a curious combination of material striving and deep anxiety. It is no coincidence that “America is the most moralistic nation on earth and also the most materialistic,” because “everyday Americans are driven to realize grand and utopian ideals through material things.” “Future-mindedness” is the cryptic label Brooks gives to this utopian striving in Middle America.

Although he does not say so, Brooks has rediscovered Max Weber’s famous and controversial Protestant ethic, a deep anxiety about salvation that supposedly provided the spark for modern capitalism by driving nervous Calvinists to seek worldly success while eschewing ostentatious luxury. Brooks writes as if this phenomenon were uniquely American. Although he finds examples of this creed throughout the American past, his account of it is ahistorical, revealing little about its origins or development. Brooks’s explanation of American exceptionalism seems to draw on a theory even older than Weber’s: Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis about the significance of the frontier in American history. When Americans encounter adversity, in Brooks’s telling, they move to a more distant suburb. (Brooks sometimes manages to make it sound nobler than that.)

Brooks points to American prudishness and moralism to argue that Americans have not let their wealth drag them into hedonistic decadence. It is a striking fact that Americans work longer hours than Japanese or Europeans. But the point is not that the Japanese and Germans are indolent. Brooks’s argument is circular: if Americans express their spirituality through material goods, then every material indulgence is evidence of American spiritual greatness. He tries to square the circle by arguing that McMansions and monster SUVs are, after all, nothing but shelter and transportation.

According to Brooks, this utopian striving is an individual affair. Any community is a transient thing. Even the urbanites of the “cool zone” are rootless gentrifiers. American residential mobility is in fact much greater than in most other lands. Everyone seems to be on the move—which is why the brand-new exurbs are America at its purest. Although Brooks does not define his “future-mindedness” as contempt for tradition, it seems to amount to that. Americans have many good reasons to make a new start on the urban frontier rather than put up with old problems, but is it noble to do so? And is it an essential part of being American?

More stable forms of community are hardly un-American. Apologists for middle-class America often point out that secular intellectuals fail to grasp the strength of religious faith in this country, a trait that sets us apart from Europeans. Brooks, for all his attention to spirituality, downplays orthodox religion. Just as historians have found the so-called Protestant ethic among Catholics, Jews, and even Confucians, Brooks, too, keeps his American religion nondenominational: “Most Americans know very little for certain except that whatever works for me is valid, and whatever works for you probably is, too.” In Brooks’ eyes, religious creeds that preach the renunciation of worldly striving are mostly futile rebellions against Americanism.

Environmentalists, too, presumably count among Brooks’s Cosmic Brunettes, the brooding doubters who always lose out to the Cosmic Blondes. The environmental movement does not rate a mention in the book. For Brooks, SUVs and big-box retailers are merely a source of amusement. Yet suburban environmentalism has, for better or worse, emerged as a powerful creed. Even the exurbanites, decried as despoilers of the land, fight to protect their woods and streams. To be sure, a community forged around the banner of this environmentalism sometimes amounts to nothing more than the defense of individual property values, as is apparent in the NIMBY rage that actually contributes to sprawl by forcing each new development to stay out of sight of the last one. Still, environmental stewardship betrays its roots in a religious ethic of self-denial, and it expresses a more communal and, indeed, more conservative form of future-mindedness.

Brooks’s Americanism seems to accord with the Club for Growth view that self-restraint—energy conservation, for example—is a bad thing. His views will be congenial to anti-planning activists like Randal O’Toole and Wendell Cox, who argue that opponents of suburban sprawl are engaged in a destructive and futile campaign to thwart the American Dream and impose a vision of community that ill fits the American character.

Brooks does not venture into any of these minefields. His “comic sociology” may be more fun to read than the serious kind, but along with the tedium, something else is lost. He wields statistics mainly for their entertainment value. A bold attempt to define a unique American character—a project that intriguingly contradicts the anti-planners’ views that only a lack of wealth and opportunity holds foreigners back from the same sprawling suburban life that we pursue—requires comparison with the rest of the world. But Brooks offers only a handful of showy (and not always reliable) statistics, along with a few perceptive observations about how American restlessness might strike someone newly arrived from abroad. (“In most other countries, people drink their coffee out of porcelain cups.”) It would be possible to marshal other figures to show that neither Brooks’s comfortable middle class run by trim “Ubermoms” nor his booming exurbs loom as large in American life as he leads you to believe.

Weber believed that the Protestant ethic spawned the “spirit of capitalism.” Brooks has something different in mind when he describes the “spiritual wind” blowing through America, but his gale is every bit as dynamic, fruitful, and contradictory, and every bit as devoted to individual wealth and the individual soul. Weber and other theorists of capitalism have long argued that the free market produces a particular kind of community, in which only the need for exchange curbs unbridled individualism and limitless desires. That sounds like Brooks’s America, where the restless mobility of the exurbs betrays a utopian desire for a life freed from the limitations imposed by time and space.

Perhaps it is true that a call for a different kind of community, whether from orthodox believers or pantheistic environmentalists, demands an ethic of self-denial that will never take root in America. Or perhaps not. Unless you think of a community as another purchasable lifestyle accessory, like a front porch, it requires compromise—that is, self-denial. It also requires a collective commitment. Brooks celebrates an America of voluntary and temporary commitments. His upbeat message might drive would-be suburban reformers to despair. Yet he does not pretend that all is well in the exurbs. If anxiety drives Americans into frenzies of consumption, perhaps it can channel our vast creative energies in other directions as well.

REFERENCES

O’Toole, Randal. The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths: How Smart Growth Will Harm American Cities. Bandon, OR: Thoreau Institute, 2001.