Word: books
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Purdy's mind, however, is another matter. With the publication of his first book--For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today (Knopf; 256 pages; $20)--the brainy nature boy has stormed the capital, panicking the languid sophisticates with an unfashionably passionate attack on the dangers of modern passionlessness. Reduced to simple headlines, Purdy's book is a precocious diatribe against the sort of media-savvy detachment that passes for intelligence and maturity in the age of Letter- man. "The ironic individual," he writes, "is a bit like Seinfeld without a script; at ease in banter, versed...
Even before its publication, Purdy's book provoked heavy return fire from the chattering classes it draws a bead on. A long review in Harper's magazine, facetiously titled Thus Spoke Jedediah and reeking of the quippy, jaded wit that Purdy fears the nation is mired in, opened by poking fun at Purdy's past and went on to brand him--ironically, of course--a "young sage," dismissing his ideas as "second- and third-hand musings." The New York Observer, a metropolitan weekly that is to the disaffected Eastern elite what the Daily Racing Form is to gambling addicts, found...
...Hampshire's Phillips Exeter Academy. Before this--except for "an hour or two a week" of what Purdy archaically calls "arithmetic"--his lessons came from random, heavy reading. He devoured everything from Hardy Boys mysteries to chunky tomes on European history. "We made pretty serious raids on thrift-store book supplies," he says. After a brief, unfulfilling interlude in the local public school, Purdy headed up to Exeter, where he both found himself intellectually and met the cultural enemy: prep school irony...
Despite its publisher's hope that Purdy's book will hit it big with thoughtful twentysomethings starved for meaning in a vacuous time, For Common Things is an arduous read that would test the syntactical skills of a tenured professor. It is not the accessible pop polemic some reviewers have made it out to be but an achingly ambitious manifesto from a very young young man who happens to be, alarmingly often, eloquent beyond his years. Insufferably smug, however, Purdy is not, particularly when it comes to his anointment as an instant wise man for the millennium. "Irony," he elegantly...
When it comes to money, my parenting style lies somewhere between that of the Godfather and a game-show host: after the family's needs are met, everything else is negotiable. Periodically, I've taken a page out of the Good Parent's Rule Book and given my daughter an allowance, usually accompanied by a little speech about money management, the go-go stock market and the magic of compounding interest...