Salon: David Brooks' dream world for the trust-fund set

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Friday, Mar 4, 2011 15:39 ET
David Brooks' dream world for the trust-fund set
His buzzed-up new fiction/science amalgam had me leaping to my feet -- to yell, "Die, yuppie scum, die!"
By PZ Myers

http://www.salon.com/news/david_brooks/index.html?story=/books/review/2011/03/04/pz_myers_on_david_brooks_the_social_animal



I made it almost a third of the way through the arid wasteland of David Brooks' didactic novel, "The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement," before I succumbed. I had begun reading it determined to be dispassionate and analytic and fair, but I couldn't bear it for long: I learned to loathe Harold and Erica, the two upscale avatars of upper-middle-class values that Brooks marches through life in the story. And then I began to resent the omniscient narrator who narrates this exercise in unthinking consumption and privilege that is, supposedly, the ideal of happiness; it's like watching a creepy middle-aged man fuss over his Barbie and Ken dolls, posing them in their expensive accessories and cars and houses and occasionally wiggling them in simulated carnal relations (have no worries, though: Like Barbie and Ken, no genitals appear anywhere in the book), while periodically pausing to tell his audience how cool it all is, and what is going on inside his dolls' soft plastic heads.

I did manage to work my way through the whole book, however, by an expediency that I recommend to anyone else who must suffer through it. I simply chanted to myself, "Die, yuppie scum, die," when I reached the end of each page, and it made the time fly by marvelously well. In addition, there is a blissful moment of catharsis when you reach the last page and one of the characters does die, although it isn't in a tragic explosion involving a tennis racket, an overdose of organic fair-trade coffee, and an assassination squad of rogue economists at Davos, as I was hoping. That's not a spoiler, by the way; the book is supposed to be all about the happy, productive life histories of Harold and Erica, from birth to death, so it's no surprise that at least one dies. It is incomplete, in that the other one survives ... an unsatisfying ending that I could happily resolve with one more bloody page, and that represents the only case I can imagine in which I'd ever ask David Brooks to write another word.

So what is this book about? It's a bizarre chimera, an unholy grafting together of a novel, the story of Harold's and Erica's lives, and an ideological, psychological, neurological and pseudo-scientific collection of materialist explanations for their happy situation. Every chapter whipsaws the reader between a fictional narrative about some exemplary event in their history -- birth, education, being attractive and popular, careers, relationships, corporate revenues, morality, European vacations and other such universal concerns -- and a pedagogical and often facile digression into the supposed neural substrates that drive and reward decisions that will make these two happy and fulfilled. Neither part stands alone, and together ... I'm sure there were delusions of a soaring synergy that would drive deep insights, but instead it's a battle between two clashing fairy tales to see which one would bore us or infuriate us first.

Consider the novel element first. It contains a straightforward narrative, a description of two people's trajectory through life. The plot is deadly dull: Erica, for instance, ascends smoothly from private school to business management to business leader to significant government functionary to the inner circles of Davos to a blissful retirement spent wallowing in high culture, with only brief stutters -- losing a tennis match, a failed business, a brief marital infidelity -- which she powers through with the discipline of her will, pausing only long enough for David Brooks to lecture the reader on how the mind overcomes adversity. What story there is here is pure mainlined bourgeois wish fulfillment, a kind of yuppie Mary Sue for the whole of the trust-fund set. There aren't even any losers to contrast with Erica's unending winningness, because everyone around them seems to be rising on the same cheerful bubble of privilege.

[Hissyspit]

1. Yuck

Myers is a braver man than I.

[CTyankee]

2. I wonder what Brooks's point is in writing this thing.

The material might be promising in the hands of a talented fiction writer, but I suspect it's all in line with David Brooks' ideology.

Perhaps there is hidden irony in this book that Brooks has heretofore not revealed in his writing.

I don't have time to read this without more relevance to his writing...

[Amerigo Vespucci]

3. Based on what I know about Brooks...

...I'd probably default to Myers' assessment ("a creepy middle-aged man fuss(ing) over his Barbie and Ken dolls, posing them in their expensive accessories and cars and houses and...")

I don't think Brooks operates from a standpoint of "hidden irony"...

[CTyankee]

4. You'd think he's well educated enough to know what we spotted immediately.

The great fiction writers such as Austen, Tolstoy, Dickens, Fitzgerald etc, have such powerful talents in presenting this kind of story that it's amazing he "missed" this essential piece!

My guess is that he is so in love with himself and surrounds himself with only "yes men/women" that he believes his own fiction.

I like to call this "A legend in his own mind."