Books: Optimist In a Jaded Age

Jedediah Purdy, 24, may have been born in the 1970s, but he grew up in the 1870s. Home was a hillside West Virginia farm plowed by a team of Percheron draft horses. School was his parents' kitchen, his neighbors' fields. Town was a country crossroads with two stores, and entertainment a new book from the library. And though the young man with the Old Testament name and the Mark Twain upbringing later went on to study at Harvard and Yale, mixing with the privileged and the trend-conscious, his heart remained in the hills, beneath the oaks.

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 in allusion, and almost debilitatingly self-aware." In Purdy's opinion, the price of such crippling cleverness is social stagnation and private emptiness. Ironists waste time smirking rather than working--working to build a better world, that is. And Purdy, an unapologetic progressive, believes in a better world. Sincerely. Earnestly. Some might even say annoyingly.

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 Purdy just as cloying and irritating. Among New Yorkers whose daily bread is irony, heavily buttered with sarcasm and ridicule, Purdy's message of earnest civic-mindedness was as welcome as a vice cop at a bachelor party.

Purdy doesn't wish to be a spoilsport. He's negative only about negativity. Temperamentally, he's an optimist who places his faith in action, not attitude. One issue close to his tender rural heart is the preservation of West Virginia wilderness from the mountain-leveling predations of modern coal mining. A student of law and forestry at Yale, he sees himself arguing his causes in court someday, but his broader goal is to spur a resurgence in grass-roots public activism. "We need today a kind of thought and action that is too little contemplated yet remains possible," he writes. "It is the kind aimed at the preservation of what we love most in the world, and a stay against forgetting what that love requires."