I’d dismiss any slur (or article) saying that New York Times columnist/TV talk show panelist David Brooks is stupid. He’s not: it’s just that Brooks, especially in his near-dotage, writes a lot of stupid, algorithm-centric essays, burdened by cliches and unoriginal (but breathless) Trump-skewering. As I’ve noted previously, though, Brooks is clever, keeping the Brooks, Inc. enterprise profitable (though not as audaciously as his Times colleague Ezra Klein, a journalistic entrepreneur whose career is legitimate fodder for a course at any business school).
I agree with some of Brooks’ latest thumb-sucker, “When novels mattered,” because I read a lot of fiction, although aside from Sally Rooney and Zadie Smith, he doesn’t mention any other contemporary novelist, perhaps because he’s too busy keeping the books at Brooks, Inc. and can’t be bothered with the likes of Fredrik Backman, Claire Keegan, Paul Murray, Colin Barrett, Michel Houellebecq, Ottessa Moshfegh, John Boyne or Richard Russo.
Brooks begins, embarrassingly: “I’m old enough to remember when novelists were big-time.” At least he didn’t say, “I’m quite literally old enough…,” but there’s always next week. Noting the best-seller list, he writes: “I have no problem with genre and popular books, but where is today’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, George Eliot, Jane Austen or David Foster Wallace?” Although he didn’t add, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio,” that was the gist, not to mention that it’s very likely in say, the 1950s, similarly myopic columnists also asked, “Where is today’s George Eliot and Jane Austen?” Brooks contradicts himself by writing, “People still have attention span enough to read the classics. George Orwell’s '1984' (an essential guide for the current moment) has sold over 30 million books, and Jane Austen’s 'Pride and Prejudice' has sold over 20 million. Americans still love literary books.”
A reader of this essay can fairly, and dispassionately, ask, so what is it, Mr. Brooks? Do novels matter or not? I think he was just plucking scattered thoughts, randomly, from his atrophied noggin and didn’t look at the final draft.
Then, grandiosely: “There used to be a sense, inherited from the Romantic era, that novelists and artists served as consciences of the nation, as sages and prophets, who could stand apart and tell us who we are.” I’ve also read Shelley, and never bought his “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” just as I don’t believe Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison or Saul Bellow were “consciences of the nation.” And I think the late Tom Wolfe, one of the most influential writers of the mid-to-late 20th century, would blush if someone accorded him that title.
Brooks digs deeper into his hole to a Walmart in Northern Virginia (to check the pulse of the country): “Go back to the 1970s, and artists and writers were attempting big, audacious things… In movies there were 'The Godfather”—I and II— and 'Apocalypse Now.'” Rock stars were writing long, ambitious anthems: 'Stairway to Heaven,' 'Free Bird' and 'Bohemian Rhapsody.'" Invocation of those three “classic rock” songs merely tells you that Brooks doesn’t have very good taste in music. I make no judgments on what rock, folk or soul from that period people like, but that Brooks presents that as a fact is… stupid.
Moving on, he writes: “Conformity is fine in some professions… but it is not fine in the writing business.” I think, but can’t be sure (not a magician, but that could be rectified), that he’s referring to fiction, but what about the conformity that dictates the content of his primary employer, The New York Times, or The Atlantic and The New Yorker?
For example, on the front page of the Times’ Sunday print edition was a “news analysis” by the paper’s White House correspondent, self-parodist Peter Baker, with the headline (subsequently changed online, a common NYT practice) “Trump’s Way Forward Is to Go In Reverse, by About a Century.” It’s the usual folderol: Baker, and the “experts” he quotes, are aghast that the President is reducing the size of the federal bureaucracy (not enough), citing William McKinley as a formative president and suggesting that Washington’s football team, the Commanders, revive its former name, the Redskins. He doesn’t mention, because it’d be inconvenient, that Trump’s foreign policy—Ukraine, the Mideast—isn’t much different than Biden’s.
Even worse, and you must stretch the imagination here, was David Litt’s July 13th “Guest Opinion,” advising fellow “follow the science” adherents that it’s now okay to talk (but not about politics) to anti-vaxxer right-wingers. The article doubles as an advertisement for his book, It’s Only Drowning: A True Story of Learning to Surf and the Search for Common Ground, which was released on June 24th.
He opens: “Not long ago, I felt a civic duty to be rude to my wife’s younger brother. I met Matt Kappler in 2012, and it was immediately clear we had nothing in common. He lifted weights to death metal; I jogged to Sondheim. I was one of President Barack Obama’s speechwriters and had an Ivy League degree; he was a huge Joe Rogan fan and went on to get his electrician’s license.”
Witt, once the pandemic fury abated, became friends with his brother-in-law, who helped him learn to surf. They found “common ground,” and I’d guess that’s meant to make Times readers smile (and sell books). Witt says, “These days, ostracism might just hurt the ostracizer more than the ostracizee.”
Elites and rubes: so happy together!
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023