Great couch potatoes of history

May 23, 2006 | Tom Lutz was inspired to write "Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers and Bums in America" by an encounter with his 18-year-old son, Cody. Recently graduated from high school, Cody was planning to take a year or two off before beginning college, so he moved out of his mother's house and into his father's "with uncertain plans."

Before we arrive at the sad and already predictable conclusion of this tale, we must bear in mind that Lutz himself was hardly a model of Calvinist rectitude. "Finishing high school in 1971 without the vaguest clue as to where my life was headed, I was saved from the Vietnam draft by a high lottery number," he writes. He then spent the better part of 10 years wandering around, taking drugs, playing in bands, living in a semi-commune, riding a motorbike through Montenegro, and working as everything from carpenter to factory hand to gymnastics instructor. Lutz eventually settled down to become a teacher and writer, but is unrepentant about his youthful escapades. His adventures, he writes, were worth it for their own sake.

So, unlike many parents, Lutz welcomed Cody's arrival. "Whatever else, I was glad that I could give him a base from which to chase a dream or two," he writes. "I was pleased that Cody, instead of just following the crowd into college, was taking a more adventurous path."

But after arriving -- and here is the foreordained conclusion -- Cody took up what seemed to be a permanent position on Lutz's couch. As Cody continued to maintain his horizontality day after day, declining even to pick up his bass and go jam with the old man's bar band, Lutz was shocked to realize that he was angry at his son -- a heart-pounding, adrenaline-pumping anger.

"I started to write this book at least in part to understand my ire as I watched my son do what I had seen him (and myself) do many times before: He was doing nothing," Lutz writes. "In my forties, I necessarily had a more acute sense of the shortness of life, but why should he? He was still husbanding the proceeds of his summer job on an organic farm in Massachusetts, not hitting me up for spending money. He was the one at the classically hormonal age, so why were mine firing?"

If the genesis of "Doing Nothing" was Lutz's attempt to answer that question, the book itself goes much deeper. Rather than focus exclusively on what we think of as the modern slacker - for example, Cody, or the 30-something goatee with no visible means of support -- he delves into the rich history of slackers past, while exploring his own and society's complex attitudes toward work and leisure. Like Lutz's brilliant study of weeping, "Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears," it's a highly intelligent, stimulatingly eclectic and impressively learned book.

Slacking is one of those subjects that is seductive but tricky to explore. It's simultaneously too broad and too narrow -- too broad because writing about laziness is like writing about life or love; too narrow because the literature of triumphant laziness turns out to be a niche form, and is somewhat self-canceling. But if the subject is too slippery and multifaceted for him to completely control, Lutz is fast enough on his feet that "Doing Nothing" is a consistently entertaining and informative read -- even if at the end we're not entirely sure what holds all these loafers, slobs, bohos and loungers together.

Although he limits himself to the last 250 years, Lutz covers an enormous amount of historical ground. After opening with a chapter titled "Cody on the Couch," a thoughtful introduction to the central issues involving slackerism, the work ethic and their related discontents, he turns next to two paradigmatic figures, Ben Franklin and Samuel Johnson. Lutz shows how in complex ways, and at the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution that inaugurated alienated labor, these two opposing figures embody the paradoxes built into our attitudes toward work and leisure.

He then embarks on a fascinating social history of the changing face of work and the wildly varying rebellious responses to it, pausing to look at the 18th century "lounger," the successor to Johnson's "Idler," and the inspiring figure of Joseph Dennie, Harvard dropout, drinker, dandy, half-assed lawyer and the unjustly forgotten father of sophisticated slothdom in America. Successive chapters offer a veritable all-star team of unproductive members of society -- "Loafers, Communists, Drinkers and Bohemians," "Nerve Cases, Saunterers, Tramps and Flaneurs," "Sports, Flappers, Babbitts and Bums," "Beats, Nonconformists, Playboys and Delinquents," "Draft Dodgers, Surfers, TV Beatniks, and Hippie Communards," and finally "Slackers" -- taking us, if the book has not already fallen from our listless and neurasthenic hands, up to the present day.

Next page: "We are all lazy impostors, and we are all workaholic slaves"