David Brooks is back in the NYT after a sabbatical and has a column in his best style: Tom Wolfe-Lite social satire. And it makes use of the gimmick he invented for his didactic novel "The Social Animal" in which the main character ages but the era he lives in remains perpetually right now. His book seemed rushed by the demands of his other duties, but I still think this idea of writing about one character who lives perpetually in the present but whose perspective changes as he ages is an extremely promising one that other writers should consider exploiting.
The Thought Leader
By DAVID BROOKS
Little boys and girls in ancient Athens grew up wanting to be philosophers. In Renaissance Florence they dreamed of becoming Humanists. But now a new phrase and a new intellectual paragon has emerged to command our admiration: The Thought Leader.
The Thought Leader is sort of a highflying, good-doing yacht-to-yacht concept peddler. Each year, he gets to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative, where successful people gather to express compassion for those not invited. ...
Many people wonder how they too can become Thought Leaders and what the life cycle of one looks like.
In fact, the calling usually starts young. As a college student, the future Thought Leader is bathed in attention. His college application essay, “I Went to Panama to Teach the Natives About Math but They Ended Up Teaching Me About Life,” is widely praised by guidance counselors. ...
Not armed with fascinating ideas but with the desire to have some, he launches off into the great struggle for attention. At first his prose is upbeat and smarmy, with a peppy faux sincerity associated with professional cheerleading.
Within a few years, though, his mood has shifted from smarm to snark. There is no writer so obscure as a 26-year-old writer. So he is suddenly consumed by ambition anxiety — the desperate need to prove that he is superior in sensibility to people who are superior to him in status. Soon he will be writing blog posts marked by coruscating contempt for extremely anodyne people: “Kelly Clarkson: Satan or Merely His Spawn?”
Of course the writer in this unjustly obscure phase will develop the rabid art of being condescending from below. Of course he will confuse his verbal dexterity for moral superiority. Of course he will seek to establish his edgy in-group identity by trying to prove that he was never really that into Macklemore.
Fortunately, this snarky phase doesn’t last. By his late 20s, he has taken a job he detests in a consulting firm, offering his colleagues strategy memos and sexual tension. By his early 30s, his soul has been so thoroughly crushed he’s incapable of thinking outside of consultantese. It’s not clear our Thought Leader started out believing he would write a book on the productivity gains made possible by improved electronic medical records, but having written such a book he can now travel from medical conference to medical conference making presentations and enjoying the rewards of being T.S.A. Pre.
By now the Thought Leader uses the word “space” a lot — as in, “Earlier in my career I spent a lot of time in the abject sycophancy space, but now I’m devoting more of my energies to the corporate responsibility space.”
The middle-aged Thought Leader’s life has hit equilibrium, composed of work, children and Bikram yoga. The desire to be snarky mysteriously vanishes with the birth of the first child. His prose has never been so lacking in irony and affect, just the clean translucence of selling out.
He’s succeeding. Unfortunately, the happy moment when you are getting just the right amount of attention passes, and you don’t realize you were in this moment until after it is gone.
The tragedy of middle-aged fame is that the fullest glare of attention comes just when a person is most acutely aware of his own mediocrity. By his late 50s, the Thought Leader is a lion of his industry, but he is bruised by snarky comments from new versions of his formerly jerkish self. Of course, this is when he utters his cries for civility and good manners, which are really just pleas for mercy to spare his tender spots.
In the end, though, a lifetime of bullet points are replaced by foreboding. Toward the end of his life the Thought Leader is regularly engaging in a phenomenon known as the powerless lunch. He and another formerly prominent person gather to have a portentous conversation of no importance whatsoever. ...
As a literary format for fictional social satire, Brooks' method where the main character ages but society doesn't has some major advantages for both author and reader. The most natural genre for novelists is the lightly fictionalized autobiographical novel, but what it was like to grow up in, say, Westchester County in the 1980s isn't necessarily all that galvanizing a subject matter in 2013, especially for somebody of satirical bent: hair metal bands really aren't that funny anymore. They've been done. We're more interested in the author poking fun at what's going on right now, but an autobiographical character can only live in 2013 for a year.
So, Brooks' invention is to write an autobiographical novel always set in the eminently satirizable present.
The traditional alternative for a The Way We Live Now satirical novel is to invent a bunch of realistic characters of different ages and different backgrounds and have them interact in a well-crafted plot. But, that's hard work. Wolfe, for example, only was fully successful at it in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Hence, this Brooks method has promise as a genre that shouldn't demand as much talent and time from the author as traditional ones.
I presume somebody else in the long history of literature did this before Brooks, but off the top of my head, I can't think of who.
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Sorry, but I've never heard of a female ancient Greek philosopheress. So I doubt many ancient Greek little girls ever dreamt of of becoming a philosopher in that notoriously male chauvinist society. If he had written 'pythoness' perhaps he would have a non sexist all-inclusive NYT brownie point.
Sounds like Brooks (now on the market, ladies) is satirizing himself.
"but I still think this idea of writing about one character who lives perpetually in the present but whose perspective changes as he ages is an extremely promising one that other writers should consider exploiting."
One way to do this is to have the main character date younger and younger women throughout his life. ;)
"As a literary format for fictional social satire, Brooks' method where the main character ages but society doesn't has some major advantages for both author and reader."
This used to be the case for most of human history, right? Things changed very slowly, so that the world you were born into was pretty much the world you died in.
But with the rise of modern world, so much changes within a decade or two. There was probably more change from 1900 to 2000 than from 1300 to 1900.
Does Brooks have a short snarky narrative of the life cycle of psuedo-cons that are employed by and write for the NYT?
Because...old snarkmesiters never really die. They just fade away into obsnarkity.
"Sorry, but I've never heard of a female ancient Greek philosopheress."
Hypatia but she came much later after the golden age of Athens.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia
Btw, Athens was far more male-dominated than, say, Sparta. Athenian women were expected to be wives and take care of the home. Few were allowed to do intellectual stuff.
It was in Sparta where women were more the equal of men. But Spartans were like the ancient SS.
http://youtu.be/hVbDiQdLkxY?t=2m30s
“I Went to Panama to Teach the Natives About Math but They Ended Up Teaching Me About Life,”
Panama? Is that the new Africa?
“Kelly Clarkson: Satan or Merely His Spawn?"
Wasn't it Rachel Abrams who called Palestinians 'the devil's spawn'... to the delight of Jennifer Rubin?
I suppose Brooks is not a 'thought leader' but a real thinker. Lol.
Here I was thinking that *this* is the Brooks who wrote The Greatest Story Ever Told, a hilarious and snarkless piece on WFB jr. back in college. And then to hear he's divorcing. So sad.
"As a literary format for fictional social satire, Brooks' method where the main character ages but society doesn't has some major advantages for both author and reader."
Actually, most fiction is like that. Usually when people make movies or write books about the past, the past we get is really just the present with part-artifacts. Take Tom Cruise in THE LAST SAMURAI. His guilt about the Indians is post-60s.
And most science fiction set in the future may have future sets but everyone thinks and acts like they are people of today.
It reads like self-satire.
Only a thought leader could come up with an idea like thought leader.
The arc of Western history. From the age of enlightenment and reason to the age of entitlement and treason.
Diotima of Mantinea was a female philosopher of the Hellenic golden age. She taught Socrates the philosophy of love.
Both the Pythagorean and Platonic schools taught women and had women teachers so I imagine quite a few ancient Greek little girls dreamt of becoming philosophers.
@Anon @ 3:19
As students of Pythagoras and Plato, I should imagine that the young women didn't dream of becoming philosophers but rather of being philosophers.
While Aristotle's feminine students would have dreamt of becoming philosophers.
And finally, as muses serving to inspire young aspiring male philosophers they would have dreamt of being becoming philosophers.
"Hair metal bands really aren't that funny anymore"
You've not heard of Steel Panther then Steve? I wasn't born until the late eighties and they're funny.
Okay, I hereby outmyself as stupid: I thought he was talking about someone like Friedman or Gladwell.
In Brooks telling these thought leaders seem indistinguishable from the Đšomsomol/Communist apparatchiks in the USSR.
where the main character ages but society doesn't
Thats something that was done in the Omen movie series (probably not intentionally). In The Omen its 1976 and a devil child is born. In The Omen II its 1978 and he is already a kid at school. By the Omen III its 1981 and he is a full grown 34 year old Sam Neill.
Well there is Waugh on Proust (Waugh tried to be funny and dismissive by stating that Proust could not rationally have meant for his main viewpoint character to be accompanied to the Champs Elysees on one page by his nanny and to be flirting with the womens on the next page). Brooks may also have read James Joyce (Finnegans Wake, a couple thousand years on one long Irish 20th century night, with main character HCE being in early middle age for every moment of it ), bizarre universe Dorian Gray from Oscar Wilde, or Snoopy (this last example might be backwards, but the little dude was, in fact, the same age for everything from WWI dogfights to post-Reagan era Bill Maudlin reunions); there is also that Brady Bunch sequence where one of the characters ages, or doesn't age, in the same way that the Brooks character you describe does, or doesn't ...
The converse is fairly common -- a character stays the same age while everybody else changes. Dracula and lots of other genre characters, Wilde's Dorian Grey, Woolf's Orlando, Waugh's Captain Grimes, Borges wrote several short stories about immortal characters, etc.
But somebody who personally ages dramatically while society remains overtly stuck in the present is a pretty weird idea. This is different from a vaguely described society that doesn't change much because it's semi-mythical or whatever. No this would be a society where the protagonist ages across eight decades while everybody continues to worry whether Facebook is so 2011 and if there will be a Sharknado sequel.
Perhaps it can't be done as a real novel?
There is Benjamin Button, but I don't know if used the premise to make social commentary.
You mean "Rip Van Winkle" except he never goes to sleep.
The studio brass will love it, Steve, it's like "Space Cowboys" Meets "Idiocracy"
Life of Julia had this quality, the one about the woman who advanced from childhood to old age, assisted at each stage by the Obama administration.
"No this would be a society where the protagonist ages across eight decades while everybody continues to worry whether Facebook is so 2011 and if there will be a Sharknado sequel.
Perhaps it can't be done as a real novel?"
I believe it can. Our protagonist moves on to new adventures while everyone else worries about a future without Paul Walker.
Almost all my examples were incorrect, but in the Letters of Evelyn Waugh, 1980 edition, page 270, Waugh states that Proust is "mentally defective" because one of his characters is clearly aging many years in the course of one summer (a page or two). Brooks would also be familiar with the situation comedy MASH, which featured characters who aged ten years over a historical span of three years.
John Mansfield said...
"Life of Julia had this quality, the one about the woman who advanced from childhood to old age, assisted at each stage by the Obama administration."
Bingo.
Obama is a Brooks fan. Brooks' quasi-novel The Social Animal came out about a year before the Obama campaign's Life of Julia website.
Anyone who has the experience of rapidly surpassing his peers - or in the other direction, of going through a life-changing trauma - can imagine the feel of such a novel.
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