Jedediah the Ironist.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Review

For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today, by Jedediah Purdy, New York: Knopf, 226 pages, $20.00

Meet Jedediah Purdy: author, young philosopher, and this moment's media darling. He has been profiled in The New York Times Magazine and in Time, which labeled him "eloquent beyond his years." His tomelet For Common Things has been reviewed almost everywhere, sometimes rapturously; The Christian Science Monitor has called it "the kind of book one finds oneself recommending unreservedly to friends, colleagues, and neighbors." Bill Moyers has reputedly said it's the best book he's read in 10 years.

And indeed, For Common Things is, in its presumptuous and pretentious way, a small masterpiece: Not just bad, it is richly bad, a book that undermines itself so intricately and thoroughly that one simply can't take it at face value. It announces that "responsible thought must resist obscuring abstractions," yet it is filled with abstract, meaningless word clots. It spends a chapter moaning that the word public has been drained of meaning, yet never, in trying to restore the term, does it distinguish the public sector from the public sphere. "We have it all in the back of our minds that our behavior is subject to psychologizing interpretation," it complains, psychologizing an entire society in the process.

There is an artfulness to this awfulness, and part of me suspects that Purdy doesn't actually exist. This manifesto against irony feels like the work of a master ironist--journalist cum fabulist Stephen Glass, perhaps, returning from retirement to spin his most amusing lie yet. Even Purdy's improbable name, part Old Testament thunder and part Deliverance twang, feels Glassian.

And if there really is a Jedediah Purdy? Then his book is a long, failed argument for itself: an earnest defense of earnestness that serves instead as an advertisement for irony. For Common Things reads like a long and dreadful college application essay, gracelessly shifting from personal reflections to Big Ideas, the latter carefully attached to names that certify the author as Well-Read.

Purdy's allusions are clumsily ostentatious: Not content simply to mention the Romantic poets, for instance, he refers to "Percy Bysshe Shelley's Romantics," as though anyone who needed to be told who the Romantics were would nod at Shelley's name. At least that reference is brief. Pages are devoted to summarizing the ideas of Tocqueville, Emerson, and other weighty...