"Trapped in an intellectual cul de sac"

David Brooks nails it in his September 20 New York Times column about the writing of Jonathan Franzen. Franzen was recently featured on the cover of Time Magazine, which christened him "Novelist of the Decade." That piqued my curiosity, and I picked up his autobiography. I soon returned it to the library, because after only a few moments into the book I realized this was just one more leftist, albeit one who could write better than most.

Franzen has a new book, "Freedom," which Brooks reviewed in his column. Are Americans unhappy and spiritually stunted? Are we overobsessed with personal freedom? Brooks believes Franzen is really writing about America's literary culture.

Brooks writes: "If you judged by American literature, there are no happy people in the suburbs, and certainly no fulfilled ones."

Bingo! Brooks continues:

"writers have become trapped in the confines of this orthodoxy. So even a writer as talented as Franzen has apt descriptions of neighborhood cattiness and self-medicating housewives, but ignores anything that might complicate the Quiet Desperation dogma. There’s almost no religion. There’s very little about the world of work and enterprise. There’s an absence of ethnic heritage, military service, technical innovation, scientific research or anything else potentially lofty and ennobling."

Broooks' final paragraph:

"Social critics from Thoreau to Allan Bloom to the S.D.S. authors of The Port Huron Statement also made critiques about the flatness of bourgeois life, but at least they tried to induce their readers to long for serious things. “Freedom” is a brilliantly written book that is nonetheless trapped in an intellectual cul de sac — overly gimlet-eyed about American life and lacking an alternative vision of higher ground."