David Brooks is an easy character to dislike. In the wake of the 2000 Presidential election, he concocted ethnographies of the habits of conservative voters to tell a story about cultural divisions and the red-blue divide that just so happened to confirm everything his readership already believed. His specialty as a columnist is to identify some just-so failure of the “welfare state” in order to promote the kind of “entrepreneur” whose semi-private innovations are austerity by another name. He loudly supported the war in Iraq. He taught a course on “Humility” at Yale that prominently featured his own works. Although it is his job to interpret the currents of American culture for an audience of millions in the pages of The New York Times, he has never been good at looking beyond his own instincts and experience.
A defining experience came when, in 2013, Brooks divorced his first wife, Sarah, and several years later married his much younger research assistant, Anne, whom he met while writing a book called The Road to Character. Ever since, it's been too tempting to read everything the columnist has written as an unspooling roman à clef of his divorce and May-September romance. And the central conceit of his new book The Second Mountain lends that reading a lot of credence: One “climbs” or “conquers” the first mountain in life, which consists of professional success and some kind of “companionate” marriage, followed by a tumble into a valley of introspection in a divorced-guy apartment, followed by “surrender” to a second mountain (how can one surrender to a mountain? best not to think too much), which is a new-model wife and a spiritual epiphany in a train station.
The book, whose subtitle is The Quest for a Moral Life, combines Brooks's patented brand of quick-sketch pop sociology with a heartfelt but paper-thin and incomplete religious conversion narrative. It gives career advice to imaginary college graduates who dissipate their 20s in pursuit of an “aesthetic” life, who see life as “possibilities to be experienced and not projects to be fulfilled or ideals to be lived out.” Spend too many years on “the Instagram life,” he warns, and you will end up in “the ditch.” The ditch is not to be confused with the “valley,” which is the necessary passage between the first and second mountains, except for those who start out on their second mountains and never leave. He advises on achieving a “maximal marriage,” which is charming in its intensity but which sounds and awful lot like crippling codependence. He concludes with a set of numbered theses on something he calls “relationalism.”
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