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On
Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and always have) in the Present Tense by
David Brooks Rating: •• (Mildly Recommended) |
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Paradocs Four
years ago, we advised readers to take a pass on David Brooks’ first book, Bobos in Paradise. Perhaps because we’ve read more
from him in recent years, thanks to his appearance as one of the token
conservatives on the op ed pages of The
New York Times, we can now mildly recommend his latest book On
Paradise Drive. There are some really good and very funny sections in On
Paradise Drive, just not enough of them. When it comes to serious sociology,
Brooks tends to drift. His points don’t come together coherently, and reading
can become frustrating if you try to take his observations too seriously.
Neither funny enough nor scholarly enough leads us toward this mild
recommendation. Here’s
an excerpt from the end of Chapter One, “Out For A Drive,” pp. 53-64: The Grill-Buying Guy I don’t know if you’ve
ever seen the expression of a man who is about to buy a first-class barbecue
grill. He walks into Home Depot or Lowe’s or one of the other megahardware complexes, and his eyes are glistening with
a faraway visionary zeal, like one of those old prophets gazing into the
promised land. His lips are parted and twitching slightly. Inside the megastore,
the man adopts the stride American men fall into when in the presence of
large amounts of lumber. He heads over to the barbecue grills, just past the
racks of affordable house-plan books, in the yard-machinery section. They are
arrayed magnificently next to the vehicles that used to be known as riding
mowers but are now known as lawn tractors, because to call them riding mowers
doesn’t fully convey the steroidized Ml tank power
of the things. The man approaches the barbecue grills with a trancelike
expression suggesting that he has cast aside all the pains and imperfections
of this world and is approaching the gateway to a higher dimension. In front
of him is a scattering of massive steel-coated reactors with names like Broilmaster P3, Thermidor, and
the Weber Genesis, because in The items in this cooking arsenal
flaunt enough metal to survive a direct nuclear assault. Patio Man goes from
machine to machine comparing their various features—the cast-iron/porcelain-coated
cooking surfaces, the 328,000-Btu heat-generating capacities, the
2,000-degree tolerance linings, multiple warming racks, lava-rock containment
dishes, or built-in electrical meat thermometers. Certain profound questions
flow through his mind. Is a 542-cubic-inch grilling surface enough,
considering he might someday get the urge to roast a bison? Can he handle the
TEC Sterling II grill, which can hit temperatures of 1,600 degrees, thereby
causing his dinner to spontaneously combust? Though the matte-steel overcoat
resists scratching, doesn’t he want a polished steel surface so he can glance
down and admire his reflection while performing the suburban manliness
rituals such as brushing tangy teriyaki sauce on meat slabs with his right hand
while clutching a beer can in an NFL foam insulator in his left? Pretty soon a large salesperson in an
orange vest— looking like an SUV in human form—comes up to him and says, “Howyadoin’,” which is “May I help you?” in Home Depot
talk. 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 rodeo-style with
joy, still manages to respond appropriately. He grunts inarticulately and
nods toward the machines. Careful not to make eye contact at any point, 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 V-shaped metal baffles, ceramic rods, and a side-mounted smoker
box. But none of this talk
matters. The guy will end up buying the grill with the best cup holders. All
major purchases of consumer durable goods these days ultimately come down to
which model has the most impressive cup holders. Having selected his joy machine, Patio
Man heads for the cash register, Visa card trembling in his hand. All up and
down the line are tough ex-football-playing guys who are used to working
outdoors. They hang pagers and cell phones from their belts (in case a power
line goes down somewhere) and wear NASCAR sunglasses, mullet haircuts, and
faded T-shirts that they have ripped the sleeves off of to keep their arm
muscles exposed and their armpit hair fully ventilated. 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 tool belt make my butt look fat?” At the checkout, Patio Man is told that
some minion will forklift the grill over to the loading dock around back. He
is once again glad that he’s driving that Yukon XL so he can approach the
loading-dock guys as a co-equal in the manly fraternity of Those Who Haul
Things. As he signs the credit-card slip, with
its massive total price, his confidence suddenly collapses, but it is revived
as wonderful grill fantasies dance in his imagination: There he is atop the uppermost tier of
his multilevel backyard dining and recreational area. This is the kind of
deck Louis XIV would have had if Sun Gods had had decks. In his mind’s eye,
Patio Man can see himself coolly flipping the garlic-and-pepper T-bones on
the front acreage of his new grill while carefully testing the
citrus-tarragon trout filets simmering fragrantly on the rear. On the lawn
below, his kids Haley and Cody frolick on the weedless community lawn that is mowed twice weekly
courtesy of the people who run Monument Crowne
Preserve, his townhome community. Haley, the fourteen-year-old daughter,
is a Travel-Team Girl who spends her weekends playing midfield against
similarly ponytailed, strongly calved soccer
marvels such as herself. Cody, ten, is a Buzz-Cut Boy whose naturally blond
hair has been cut to lawnlike stubble, and the
little that’s left is highlighted an almost phosphorescent white. Cody’s
wardrobe is entirely derivative of fashions he has seen watching the X Games.
Patio Man can see the kids playing with child-safe lawn darts alongside a
gaggle of their culde-sac friends, a happy
gathering of Haleys and Codys
and Corys and Britneys.
It’s a brightly colored scene—Abercrombie & Fitch pink spaghetti-strap
tops on the girls and ankle-length canvas shorts and laceless
Nikes on the boys. Patio Man notes somewhat uncomfortably that in Nonetheless, Patio Man envisions a
Saturday-evening party—his adult softball-team buddies lounging on his imniaculate deck furniture, watching him with a certain
moist envy as he mans the grill. They are moderately fit, sockless
men in Docksiders, chinos, and Tommy Bahama muted Hawaiian shirts. Their wives, trim Jennifer
Aniston lookalikes, wear capris
and sleeveless tops, which look great on them owing to their countless hours
on the weight machines at Spa Lady. These men and women may not be Greatest
Generation heroes, or earthshaking inventors such as Thomas Edison, but if
Thomas Edison had had a human-resources department, and that department organized
annual enrichment and motivational conferences for midlevel management, then
these people would be the marketing executives for the back-office support
consultants to the meeting-planning firms that hook up the HR executives with
the conference facilities. They are wonderful people. Patio Man
can envision his own wife, Cindy, the Realtor Mom, circulating among them
serving drinks, telling parent-teacher-conference stories and generally
stirring up the hospitality; he, Patio Man, masterfully wields his extra-wide
fish spatula while absorbing the aroma of imported hickory chips—again, to
the silent admiration of all. The sun is shining. The people are friendly.
The men are no more than twenty-five pounds overweight, which is the socially
acceptable male-paunch level in upwardly mobile Patio Man has completed his purchase,
another triumph in a lifetime of conquest shopping. As he steps into the
parking lot, he is momentarily blinded by sun bouncing off the hardtop. He is
no longer in that comfy lifestyle center where he and his family took their
lunch. Now he is confronted by the mighty landscape of a modern big-box mall,
one of the power centers where exurban people do the bulk of their shopping. Megastores surround him on all sides like trains
of mighty pachyderms. Off to his right there’s a Wal-Mart, a Sports
Authority, and an Old Navy large enough to qualify for membership in the
United Nations. Way off on the horizon, barely visible because of the
curvature of the earth, is a Sneaker Warehouse. Just off the highway beyond,
is a row of heavily themed suburban chain restaurants, which, if they all
merged, would be known as Chili’s Olive Garden Hard Rock Outback Cantina—a melange of peppy servers, superfluous ceiling fans, free
bread with olive oil, taco-salad entrées, and enough sun-dried-tomato
concoctions to satisfy the population of Tuscany for generations. This parking lot is so big you could
set off a nuclear device in the center and nobody would notice in the stores
on either end. In fact, in the modern American suburbs, there’s often not
just one big-box mall, there are archipelagos of them. You can stand on the
edge of one and look down into a valley and see three more—huge area-code
stretches of parking area surrounded by massive shopping warehouses that
might be painted in racing stripes to break up the monotony of their
windowless exteriors. If one superstore is at one mall, then its competitor
is probably down the way. There’s a PETsMART just down from a PETCO, a Borders
near a Barnes & Noble, a Linens ‘n Things within sight of a Bed Bath
& Beyond, a Target staring at a Kmart staring at a Wal-Mart, a Best Buy
cheek by jowl with a Circuit City. Patio Man doesn’t know it yet, but
cutting diagonally across the empty acreage in the very lot he is standing
in, bopping from megastore to megastore,
is his very own beloved wife, Realtor Mom. She’s cruising across the terrain
in her minivan, but it’s no ordinary minivan. If crack dealers drove
minivans, this is the kind they’d drive. It’s a black-on-black
top-of-the-line Dodge Grand Caravan ES, with phat
spoilers, muscle grillework, road-hugging
fog-lights, and ten Infinity speakers that she controls with little buttons
on the back of her steering wheel because reaching over to the knobs is too
much effort. Her eyes narrow as she heads for the
Sam’s Club megastore. She sees an empty parking
spot just next to ones set aside for pregnant women and the handicapped, not
over twenty yards from the front door. As she zooms in, she notices
competition coming from the northeast. There’s a rule in the suburbs: The
bigger the car, the thinner the woman. And sure enough, here comes a size-six
Jazzercise wife in a Lincoln Navigator, trying to get her spot. But the
Navigator woman has made two horrible mistakes. First, she’s challenged a
minivan driver who is in no mood to appear even more tame and domesticated.
And second, she doesn’t seem to realize that in Realtor Mom is halfway through her
shopping expedition. She’s already trekked through the Though Realtor Mom likes Wal-Mart, it’s
the price club that really gets her heart racing, because price clubs are
Wal-Mart on acid. Here you can get laundry detergent in 41-pound tubs,
30-pound bags of frozen Tater Tots, frozen waffles in 60-serving boxes, and
packages of 1,500 Q-tips, which is 3,000 actual swabs since there’s cotton on
both ends. These stores have been constructed according to the modern
American principle that no flaw in design and quality is so grave that it
can’t be compensated for by mind-boggling quantity. The aisles here are wider
than most country lanes. The frozen-food section looks like a
university-sized cryogenics lab, and the cutlery section could pass as a
medieval armory. The shelves are packed from the linoleum floor clear up to
the thirty-foot fluorescent-lighted ceilings with economy-sized consumer
goods on massive wooden pallets. Sometimes you look up and consider what
would happen if there were an earthquake right now, and you think, Great,
I’m going to be crushed to death under a hillside of falling juice boxes. The first time Realtor Mom went into
one of the places and got a load of the size of the household goods, she naturally
wanted to see what kind of person would come here shopping for condoms. But
what’s truly amazing is that wherever you go in a price club, everybody in
every aisle is having the same conversation, which is about how much they are
saving by buying in bulk. Sometimes you overhear “If you use a lot, it
really does pay” or “They never go bad, so you can keep them forever” or
“It’s nice to have fifteen thousand Popsicles, since someday we plan on having
kids anyway . . .“ All the
people in all the aisles feel such profound satisfaction over their good
deals that they pile the stuff into their shopping carts—which are practically
the size of eighteen-wheelers, with safety airbags for the driv-er—so that by the time they head toward the
checkout, they look like the supply lines for the Allied invasion of
Normandy. But they feel they’ve accomplished
something. In purchasing Post-it notes by the million, they have put something
over on the gods of the marketplace. They have one-upped the poor nonclub members who have betrayed their families by
failing to get the best deal. They are the savvy marketplace swashbucklers
who have achieved such impressive price-tag victories that they will return
home in glory to recount tales of their triumphs to tables of rapt dinner
guests. Bragging about what a good deal you got is one of the many great art
forms that my people, the Jews, have introduced to American culture. This trip, Realtor Mom is saving a
bundle on frozen sausage-and-pepperoni Pizza Pockets. She’s making a killing
on tennis balls and vermouth-flavored martini onions. She has triumphantly
advanced in the realm of casual merlot and inflatable water-wing acquisition.
She has stocked up on so many fat-free, salt-free, lactose-free, and
cholesterol-free items that the boxes she’s carrying might as well be empty. She, too, heads back to her vehicle
with a sense that she has shopped victoriously. In this complicated and
time-stressed world, she has demonstrated, at least for an instant, her
mastery of everyday life. She has achieved par. As it transpires, she finishes her
rounds just as Patio Man is pulling out of the mall with his backyard
wonder-grill tucked snugly into the back of his They drive home together. They turn
left on The town fathers in their suburb have
tried halfheartedly to control sprawl. As Patio Man and his wife cruise over
a hilltop and look down on the expanse of suburb below, they can see,
stretched across the landscape, little puffs here and there of brown smoke.
That’s bulldozers kicking up dirt while building new townhomes,
office parks, shopping malls, firehouses, schools, AmeriSuites
guest hotels, and golf courses. As a result of the ambivalently antigrowth
zoning regulations, the homes aren’t spread out with quarter-acre yards, as
in the older, more established suburbs; they’re clustered into pseudo-urbanist pods. As you scan the horizon, you’ll see a
densely packed pod of townhouses, then a half-mile stretch of investor grass
(fields that will someday contain thirty-five-thousand-square-foot Fresh Mex restaurants but are now being kept fallow by
investors until the prices come up), then another pod of slightly more expensive
but equally dense-packed detached homes. Realtor Mom and Patio Man’s little
convoy is impressive—8,000 pounds of metal carrying 290 pounds of human
being. They finally bear right into their community—their Street has been
given the imperious but baffling name Trajan’s
Column Terrace—and they pull into their double-wide driveway in front of the
two-car garage and next to the adjustable-height Plexiglas backboard. Their home is a mini-McMansion gable-gable house. That is to say, it’s a
3,200-square-foot middle-class home built to look like a 7,000-square-foot
starter palace for the nouveaux riche. On the front elevation is a big gable
on top, and right in front of it, for visual relief,
a little gable juts forward so it looks like a baby gable leaning against a
mommy gable. These homes have all the same features
of the authentic McMansions (as history flows on, McMansions have come to seem authentic), but everything
is significantly smaller. There are the same vaulted atriums behind the front
doors that never get used and the same open-kitchen/two-story great rooms
with soaring Palladian windows. But in the middle-class knockoffs, the rooms
are so small—especially upstairs—that the bedrooms and master-bath suites
wouldn’t fit inside one of the walk-in closets of a real McMansion. As the happy couple emerges from the
vehicles, it is clear that they are both visibly flushed and aroused. With
the juices still flowing from their consumer conquests, it’s all they can do
to keep from humping away like a pair of randy stallions
right there on the front lawn under the shade of the seasonal holiday banner
hanging above the front door. But that would violate the community association’s
public copulation guidelines. So, with the kids away at their various
practices, and not due to get carpooled home for another hour, 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. This today is one version
of the American Dream: wild, three-location suburban sex in close proximity
to one’s own oversized motor vehicles and a brand-new top-of-the-line
barbecue grill. In the course of our drive through middle- and
upper-middle-class suburbia, we’ve seen other contemporary versions of the
dream. But still, in all our segmented diversity, there are certain traits
that Americans tend to share, traits that join the
many flavors of suburban culture and distinguish us from people in other
lands. We’ll get a glimpse of some in the next chapter. Throughout On
Paradise Drive, there are times when Brooks’ writing brings smiles. Chapter
8 on working will make many readers laugh as they try to Find Your Fry! If
you enjoy reading Brooks, you’re likely to put up with the shortcomings in
this book as you smile, chuckle and nod. If you’re looking to think, or to
laugh, look elsewhere. Steve
Hopkins, July 26, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the August 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/On
Paradise Drive.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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