Charlie Pierce has lost all patience with David Brooks’ shtick. That’s an amusing rant, if you like that sort of thing (I do, and Pierce is really good at it), but I’m just going to use it as an excuse to repost part of my own David Brooks rant, explaining why his book Bobos in Paradise — which was often quite fun — led me to read everything he writes with great suspicion.
Bobos, published in 2000, begins with Brooks detailing the changes in his hometown, the Main Line suburb of Wayne, Pa. I went to college there and I’ve lived in the area ever since, so much of what Brooks described was familiar to me. But — and this is the point — much of it was extremely un-familiar to me because it wasn’t accurate.
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 Reader’s Forum, alas, has fallen on hard times, but it has outlasted that “mammoth new Border’s nearby,” which was actually about a 20-minute drive away from Wayne.
So anyway, remember: Support your local independent bookstores and don’t trust everything David Brooks writes.
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