On Paradise Drive by David BrooksSimon & Schuster, 2004

Brooks describes himself as a “comic sociologist,” and the best parts of this book, I think, are the humorous ones, the amusingly exaggerated descriptions of suburban America and what you find there: price clubs and other big-box mega-retailers, chain restaurants, softball teams, competitive mothers. Brooks’s primary argument, which is that middle America actually has unplumbed spiritual depths, strikes me as somewhat tenuous. Part of his argument is historical: the Puritans and the pioneers had this clear sense of a destiny they were moving toward, and that destiny expressed itself in constant motion, outward, westward, upward. That drive for motion persists in the Protestant work ethic, which pervades much of this country: people work hard, people work long hours, people throw themselves into their careers, rather than just working to pay the bills. The result of all this striving, Brooks claims, is that, on the whole, we can’t exist in the moment: it’s hard to ignore what Brooks calls “the Achievatron,” the ways in which we’re molded from childhood to attain one goal after another, with never a moment to rest. But it seems that what Brooks is arguing is that because, historically, the American tendency towards motion was driven by spiritual conviction, our current frenzied pace is also driven by that spiritual conviction, even if we don’t know it or articulate it. Our materialist culture, he claims, isn’t about things themselves: rather, it’s about improvement, and it just happens to be expressed in tangible and physical ways.