Bobos " R" Us

Book: Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
Author: David Brooks
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Price: $25

Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? The presence of your fingerprints on this magazine is prima facie evidence that you are a Bobo. But let me question you further. Are you now, or have you ever been, inside a Restoration Hardware? Just as I suspected. At breakfast this morning, did your coffee cost more than your newspaper? Was said hot beverage brewed from responsibly picked Costa Rican beans and fashioned into -- gasp -- a latte? Thought so. Do you utterly reject being an Organization Person and instead consider yourself a card-carrying, self-actualizing, paradigm-shifting, change-embracing knowledge worker for whom work is both a source of income and a search for meaning?

No further questions. In fact, the jury has already reached a verdict: Guilty as charged. You're a Bobo. And you're sentenced to a place atop the American hierarchy.

America now has a new ruling class, argues author David Brooks in his zeitgeisty book, Bobos in Paradise. Well-educated Information Age lions and lionesses who scored well on their aptitude tests and who flourish in a world that prizes merit over heredity have toppled the WASP establishment that dominated postwar American life. Or, as Brooks so nicely puts it, "Dumb good-looking people with great parents have been displaced by smart, ambitious, educated, and antiestablishment people with scuffed shoes."

What makes this new elite unique, and what may be the secret of its success, is that its members have reconciled two seemingly disparate cultures: They have blended the mainstream and the countercultural. Like the investment bankers that many of them are, they have engineered a merger, one that brings together bourgeois values and bohemian attitudes -- hence Brooks's somewhat goofy new label that borrows a "bo" from each reconciled half. "These Bobos define our age," he writes. "They are the new establishment. Their hybrid culture is the atmosphere we all breathe."

Bobos sip Starbucks coffee from Pottery Barn mugs while sitting on peasanty but pricey throw rugs writing an Internet business plan on their iBooks. They are people who, as Brooks says, "seem to turn life into one long stint of graduate school." They are people who, uh, read Fast Company.

Indeed, Brooks groks that the new world of business may be the most robust expression of Bobo ascendance. He correctly points out that business is the only "realm of American life where the language of 1960s radicalism remains strong." Bobos have beliefs: Work is personal, computing is social, and knowledge is power -- memes that happen to be the mantras that were emblazoned on the cover of the first issue of this magazine, which came out nearly five years ago.

"In 1950s Business Week profiles," Brooks writes, "an executive would be shown sitting in an impressive mahogany-and-brass office or perhaps with his sleeves rolled up at a work site. Now the predominant visual prop is the wacky accouterment. DreamWorks's Jeffrey Katzenberg will be shown with his Supersoaker water cannon ? An amazing number of executives are pictured with domesticated birds like cockatoos perched on shoulders and heads, or with ugly dogs of obscure breeding panting on their laps." Sound familiar?

In less able hands, this book might have turned into a bloated news-magazine trend story -- or an angry screed decrying the Bobonic Plague. But Brooks is a felicitous writer and a confessed "defender of the Bobo culture." He's produced a nuanced book that is witty without being wearying and wise without being windy. His deconstruction of New York Times wedding announcements is brilliant -- as is his short course on how to be a public intellectual. And, unlike many social critics, David Brooks is fun to read.

My one gripe is that, although Brooks is an astute reader of sociological texts and of commercial-culture entrails, he's not a reporter -- at least not in this book -- and he buttresses too many of his arguments with wry one-liners instead of with hard data and vivid stories. For his chapter on business life, his reporting consists mainly of crossing the street in Burlington, Vermont -- and then overhearing a conversation during lunch. For his chapter on spiritual life, he sits on a rock in Montana and then browses a few nearby bookstores.

But I can't quibble with Brooks's core argument. Heck, at times I felt as if he had installed a secret Web-cam in my house and had been monitoring how my own family lives. (If archaeologists of the 26th century excavate the soil beneath our Washington, dc home, they're sure to find many valuable artifacts of Bobo life circa 2000: spent bags of Starbucks coffee; yellowed diplomas from Amherst, Northwestern, and Yale; and vast reserves of fat-free organic refried beans.)