Some years ago my then-flatmate Rich set out to open a cafe in his hometown of Wayne, Pa. This was good news for me, since roasters and growers began deluging our Ardmore apartment with samples of their goods.
Rich had no money of his own, but he found a financial partner who appreciated his attention to detail, his capacity for hospitality and his passion to create a "great good place." (The phrase comes from the title of this book by Ray Oldenburg, which inspired Rich to get into the coffehouse biz.)
About six months after Rich opened The Gryphon, another cafe opened about a block away. Rich was worried he might lose some business, but he continued to thrive even after a third cafe — and then a Starbucks McCafe — opened during the following year.
The Gryphon is, indeed, a great good place. The coffee and menu, the music and ever-changing artwork, and the fine taste in music have made the cafe a gathering place for everyone from Rotarians and church groups to college students and skateboarding teens.
Even David Brooks has visited, although he didn't seem to notice the Rotarians when he skipped by. Here's how he described the place in his 2000 book Bobos in Paradise:
The town [Wayne, Pa.], once an espresso desert, now has six gourmet coffeehouses. The Gryphon draws sallow-eyed teenage sophisticates and hosts poetry readings. …
This description struck me as odd. I'm neither a teenager, nor a sophisticate. Nor am I "sallow-eyed." I suppose I've seen kids in the place who might fit Brooks' description, but I've also seen Mainline businessmen in there reading The Wall Street Journal before catching the R5. There's a blind-man-and-the-elephant slant to Brooks' description. His sketches sometimes carry the selective exaggeration of a caricaturist.
But then Brooks' description of Wayne in general was a bit strange. "Over the past six years or so … a new culture has swept into town and overlaid itself" he writes, citing examples such as:
A fabulous independent bookstore named the Reader's Forum has moved into town where the old drugstore used to be (it features literary biographies in the front window), and there's a mammoth new Borders nearby where people can go and feel guilty that they are not patronizing the independent place.
Reader's Forum is a gloriously idiosyncratic place where books aren't so much shelved as piled and stacked seemingly at random, yet the proprietor seems to know exactly what's in stock and exactly where it is. I just talked to him to confirm that what I remembered was accurate — the store has been in Wayne since 1986.
The proprietor noted that Brooks' parents still come in once in a while, just as they did at the store's old Ardmore location before it moved to Wayne. "Nice people," he noted. "Teachers." It seems odd to cite a store your parents have shopped in for decades as evidence of a new trend.
The nearest Borders is either the one at the King of Prussia mall or the one in Rosemont. Both are several towns away and a pain in the neck to drive to from Wayne.
Details like those don't undermine the essential thrust of Brooks' argument in Bobos. It still seems to me that the book describes something real. Yet this laxness leads me to read Brooks' New York Times columns with a bit more of a skeptical eye — if not a sallow one. If you want to describe something real on the basis of a few telling anecdotes, you need to make sure those anecdotes are accurate.
In the April issue of Philadelphia magazine (via Atrios and Tapped) Sasha Issenberg follows up on more of Brooks' anecdotal evidence and finds much of it insupportable.
One shouldn't overstate the implications of Issenberg's long list of "Boo boos in paradise" — Brooks' selective use of fact-esque illustrations does not make him Stephen Glass. But Issenberg's fact-checking does provide a helpful reminder that sweeping generalizations based on colorful storytelling and choice anecdotes ought not to be taken as scientific truth. Particularly when those choice anecdotes don't turn out to be true.
UPDATE: Kevin Drum thinks Issenberg is being unfair to Brooks:
… finding exceptions to Brooks' generalizations is both trivial and pedantic, especially when Issenberg admits multiple times that Brooks really does have a point.
Fair enough. My point here is that when I read Brooks' book I had firsthand experience with some of the places he described, and his descriptions of those places didn't ring true for me. This made me wonder about his descriptions of things I didn't already know about. Issenberg's piece suggests that my experience isn't unique.
I agree with Kevin — and with Brooks, who is quoted in Issenberg's piece — that many of Brooks' observations in pieces like "Patio Man" are really just jokes. As Issenberg also notes, many of them are, in fact, recycled versions of Tim Allen and Jeff Foxworthy jokes. But when was the last time you heard somebody refer to Jeff Foxworthy as a "public intellectual"?
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