net.wars.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick

by Wendy M. Grossman, New York: New York University Press, 236 pages, $21.95

Near where I grew up in New Jersey lie the ruins of a 19th-century Fourierist settlement, a utopian experiment devoted to communal living that lasted about a decade before the participants realized that they simply couldn't bear the sight of each other anymore. My friends and I would ride our bikes past the historical markers and the old foundations and crack jokes about the folly of building paradise in New Jersey, of all places.

The utopian impulse is, of course, one of the bedrock elements of American history and culture. In a real sense, evocations such as John Winthrop's dream of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a "city on a hill" helped create and sustain America, both as an actual historical place and as an imagined location where human beings would somehow be freed from the failings and imperfections they evidenced all too abundantly elsewhere in the world.

Utopias always fail to deliver fully on their promises - and their dismal success rate in American settings has energized memorable fictional treatments ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1852 novel, The Blithedale Romance (which details the author's disheartening experience with the famous Brook Farm commune in Massachusetts), to F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 book, The Great Gatsby (which in its final passages turns to a compelling meditation on the unfulfilled potential of the New World), to Arthur Penn's wonderful 1969 film Alice's Restaurant (which is very loosely based on the Arlo Guthrie song and takes place at a fractious hippie commune). Different schemes fail for different reasons, but one of the main causes is that utopias are typically envisioned as complete, perfect just-so situations; as total, fixed end-states rather than as continuing processes of social evolution, adjustment, and change.

This isn't to say that utopian communities yield no benefits: They provide larger society with all sorts of models, examples, and possibilities for human interaction. The perfect union is perhaps impossibly elusive, but to the extent that America has delivered on its utopian promise, it remains inspired by the pursuit of, to echo the Constitution, "more perfect" unions. That recognition of process, built into the United States' founding document, underwrites whatever success the American "experiment" has enjoyed. Indeed, what my adolescent friends and I failed to recognize was that we were living in Utopia, or at least its kissing cousin - a voluntary association that benefited those who participated. Few of us were natives to either my hometown or even New Jersey. Our parents had moved there for basically the same purpose: the opportunity to build a better life. (For similar reasons, so...