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New York Times pundit David Brooks was once a funny and keen-eyed observer of America's social foibles. Now he's become a weird cheerleader for fetishized Ordinary Americans who express their spirituality by buying big-screen TVs.

By Laura Miller

May 25, 2004 | The distance from amusing to annoying can be a matter of one step or, in the case of David Brooks, a brief, ignominious, muddy slide. Brooks has been hilarious and original in his social and cultural essays for the Atlantic Monthly and in "Bobos in Paradise," his book about the vicissitudes of the baby boom generation, but his more recent stint as an Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times is a case of the Peter Principle in action. Brooks is out of his depth, as his recent flailings on the Iraq war have made painfully clear. It's enough to make you yearn for his return to the territory of "Bobos," where Brooks acquitted himself so well. Then along comes his new book, "On Paradise Drive," to prove once again that you should be careful what you wish for.

Admittedly, Brooks is in an impossible position. Liberals are forever claiming that they'd be happy to read a conservative writer if only the press would publish one who wasn't a moron or a hateful, irrational liar. Brooks is supposed to be that writer. He is not, for example, all that conservative, especially on social issues, and he's neither a snoot of the old school like William F. Buckley Jr. nor a venomous hypocrite like Rush Limbaugh nor, God forbid, a borderline sociopath like Michael Savage.

But although they won't admit it, most liberals secretly believe that no one sensible and decent could ever seriously entertain conservative ideas, and therefore no one could ever fulfill the platonic role of Acceptable Conservative. It's a Catch-22 situation Brooks has stepped into. Still, his lack of consistency and intellectual chops certainly hasn't helped his case any.

What does work for Brooks is what he accurately identifies as the provincial complacency of the people he both writes for and skewers, the intelligentsia on the coasts and in the handful of inland blue states. His brief is to explain the mores and mind-set of the great flyover to overeducated, full-of-themselves urbanites in a way that needles their unthinking disdain for such places. This wouldn't get him very far, of course, if those urbanites didn't lap this stuff up, or if the readership of highbrow magazines and the newspaper of record didn't include lots of people who feel both resentful of and somewhat intimidated by what used to be called the Northeastern elite. Class animosity lives on in America, however much Brooks may claim otherwise.

Also, Brooks is funny, a rare quality among social critics. This serves him well when he's on his own turf, describing the trappings and preoccupations of the way we live now. (On subjects requiring gravitas -- the current war, for example -- he's stripped of his chief rhetorical tool, and the result has been a sorry sight to behold.) However, the ideal format for Brooks' wit is the 1,000-word column, a length ideally suited to a riff on the psychosexual symbology of outdoor grills, the future market for play-date attorneys or the rituals of the business traveler. String a bunch of these riffs together and you get ... a bunch of riffs strung together, or, in the case of "On Paradise Drive," the riffs plus lots of pithy quotes from the likes of Alexis de Tocqueville, George Santayana and Walt Whitman, glued together with dollops of fuzzy, self-contradictory "analysis" from Brooks himself.

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