BOBOS IN PARADISE: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.

• Author: Shuger, Scott
• Position: Review

BOBOS IN PARADISE: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks Simon & Schuster, $25.00

HERE'S A TRUSTWORTHY sociological generalization: You can't trust sociological generalizations. So you can rest assured that you are not living the resume-building networky faux-life David Brooks so brilliantly limns in this book. Like hell you can. If you're a boomer or younger, if you went to an Ivy League school (or you wish you did), if your nuptials made The New York Times' wedding page (or you wish they did), if you've never been in a Winchell's but can't get your day started without a vente almond frappaccino--boy, has Brooks got your number.

The thesis of this book, no less compelling for its simplicity, is that American culture today--from the low, low end of what kinds of gardening tools we prize to the high, high end of what sorts of books get written at think tanks--is driven by, explained by, and limited by the new elite's synthesis of bohemian and bourgeois values (hence the term, bobo). To hear Brooks tell it, in just the past few years, America's best and brightest have stopped trying to fight the centuries-long wars between ideas and money, art and commerce, fairness and merit, freedom and order, and instead have enthusiastically joined both sides.

Brooks is particularly adept at articulating boboism's peculiar incommensurabilities. And in the spirit of Twain, Bierce, and Veblen, his chief tool is mercifully not the statistic nor the chart, but the joke. For instance, he explains the new pecking order thus: "To calculate a person's status, you take his net worth and multiply it by his antimaterialistic attitudes.... Thus, to be treated well in this world, not only do you have to show some income results; you have to perform a series of feints to show how little your worldly success means to you" Hence the value, Brooks explains, of dressing a notch lower than those around you or speaking of your nanny as if she were your close personal friend. Then there is the new mode of conspicuous consumption: "Only vulgarians spend lavish amounts of money on luxuries. Cultivated people restrict their lavish spending to necessities" Such Brooks aphorisms are buttressed by his open-eyed reporting on the places and things that attract bobos. He's done his time in Burlington, Vermont and Wayne, Pennsylvania, at REI and Restoration Hardware.

And indeed he's interested in these places and things, because he is ... well, a bobo. It's Brooks'...